


Night and Day

by FrenchTwistResistance



Category: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (TV 2018)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-10
Updated: 2019-05-30
Packaged: 2019-10-07 16:14:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 37
Words: 22,460
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17369186
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FrenchTwistResistance/pseuds/FrenchTwistResistance
Summary: Hilda knows herself, and she knows her dreams, and she lets her dreams tell her what they will.Except when she doesn’t.





	1. Chapter 1

Hilda doesn’t dream often, but she when does, she trusts her subconscious to tell her things.

It’s the way of witches.

Freud had tried to co-opt it, of course. But his analyses don’t hold a candle to what a witch can do with a vision, a single color, an absence of a color, a bizarre detail, an atypical character.

She had dreamed the night before Edward died.

She had dreamed the night before Zelda first killed her.

She had dreamed the night before her menstrual cycle began.

But.

There are some dreams she doesn’t trust.

She doesn’t trust outside direction. She eschews potions and lucidity training. Especially eschews manipulative demons.

She forgets these influences quickly and by force of will.

It’s her way.

She is saner and calmer for it.

She knows herself, and she knows her dreams, and she lets her dreams tell her what they will.

Except when she doesn’t.

The week after Batibat, she dreams every night.

She wakes and wills herself to forget.

But.

She is sweating, and her heart is pounding, and she is having trouble focusing. The dreams come back in the mango she’s just peeled, in the orchid blooming on her desk.

She tries chamomile tea. And then whiskey.

But it’s every night regardless.

She burns herself roasting a sheet of pumpkin seeds and finally says to herself,

“Hell’s teeth!”

And now that she’s spoken her pain, she has to know. She has to know whether her dreams are organic or artificial. She has to know so much.

She doesn’t have a driver's license, but she takes the hearse anyway.

She parks at the edge of the wood. There’s nowhere else, after all.

She walks the rest of the way, half dreaming as she goes, even though she’s awake. But is she really?

A disembodied knock.

Hilda must have knocked although she doesn’t remember doing so. She hears it, though, loud. Louder than her heartbeat, even.

The heavy wooden door does not creak as it opens.

Mary Wardwell is there, smiling in green satin.

“Hello,” Mary says.

Hilda stands silent and stiff for a moment. She doesn’t look at any décolletage. She doesn’t look at any inviting, inciting postures braced against door frames. She’s had quite enough of those in her dreams.

They look each other in the eyes, and Mary is still smiling, and Hilda is still frowning.

“Hi,” Hilda finally says. It isn’t what she’d wanted to say.

“Would you like to come in?” Mary says, her smile marginally less fake. Hilda blinks, blinks again, regains some fortitude.

“Not really, but I need to speak with you, so I ought to, I suppose.”

Mary Wardwell further opens the door, gesticulates grandly.

“Have you eaten?” Mary says. Hilda slides in the door, stands uncomfortably in the foyer, says,

“I’m not here to eat, Miss Wardwell.”

“Pity,” Mary says.

They again look at each other.

“Have a seat,” Mary says.

They stay standing and staring.

“You’re not going to offer to take my coat?” Hilda says. Mary hitches a brow:

“I wasn’t sure you’d relinquish it.”

Hilda shrugs out of her wool coat, extends it against her better judgment. (But her dreams, her dreams.)

Mary takes it, and then she moves closer to Hilda. Her arms surround her as she places the coat on a hook on the wall behind Hilda. They breathe together for just a second before Mary is again gesticulating and saying,

“Have a seat. Please.”

Hilda follows the line of Mary’s arm and finds herself in a plush chair near the fireplace.

Mary sits, too. In a complementary chair.

“So?” Mary says. “You've come here for a reason?”

Hilda laughs.

Mary stares into her.

“You’ve come here for no reason, then?”

Hilda laughs again. But manages to say,

“Of course I have a reason. My question is what’s your reason?”

They look at each other. Mary opens her mouth, but Hilda continues:

“I may not seem like much, but I know a dream that’s been tampered with when I wake up from it. And I certainly know it after I’ve woken up from it six times in a row. What are you playing at, Miss Wardwell?”

Now Mary laughs. But Hilda hardens.

“What. Exactly. Are you playing at?”

Mary reclines, closes her eyes, says,

“I found a place to play and I played.”

Hilda considers.

“I’d rather you found a different playground,” Hilda says.

Mary straightens, and her eyes are suddenly alert and boring into Hilda:

“It seems the playground found me.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> There’s like a whole genre of fanfic involving Lilith invading Zelda’s dreams and banging her within an inch of her life. Why shouldn’t Hilda have the same? Also, my thighs were restless and itching for a bandwagon to jump on.


	2. Chapter 2

It’s all a country-western song.

It’s all pain and cheating and coal mines.

She couldn’t fathom.

Yet she did fathom.

Fathoming the fathomless.

xxx

“I ought to have something to ground me,” Hilda says. “A top or something. Like that movie.”

A fraught look.

“Or a dreidel?” Hilda says finally.

“I made you out of clay,” Mary Wardwell says in rhythm but not in tune. She reaches into a wooden box near the hearth, produces the thing, spins it. It stops, she reads it and says, “Gimel.”

All.

“I still don’t trust you,” Hilda says.

“You wouldn’t,” Mary says. “But I trust you.”

A blink a stare a fathom.

“You don’t either,” Hilda says. “If you did, you would’ve approached me differently.”

Mary stands, paces, says,

“No. I wouldn’t have approached you differently. You believe in dreams.”


	3. Chapter 3

Yes, Hilda believes in dreams. But not all dreams.

She doesn’t believe in the dreams where Mary Wardwell enters through the window and seduces her, licks her cunt, tells her pretty lies.

She doesn’t believe in the dreams where she’s happy and satisfied.

xxx

Freud might’ve said so many things about it.

xxx

Hilda looks.

Mary looks.

They look at each other.

xxx

Hilda is still sitting, and Mary is still pacing.

“You haven’t answered my question,” Hilda says,

Mary stops in her circuit, pierces Hilda with her stare, says,

“I don’t know which question to answer, and I don’t care.”

“You do know which question to answer, and you do care. Six nights in a row, I’ve witnessed just this. Six nights in a row, love.”

“You’re right,” Mary says. She crosses directly and places herself on Hilda’s lap. “I do care. But so do you.”

They settle into each other. It’s both natural and surreal.

“You still haven’t answered me, and I suppose I don’t care much, either. I just want you to stop,” Hilda says. Mary looks down at her:

“No you don’t.”

Hilda’s hands fist into her hips, scratching and bruising.

“I have better things to do,” Hilda says.

“No you don’t.”

Hilda’s hands are still bruising, now on the outside of muscular thighs.

“I need to get home,” Hilda says.

“No you don’t.”

Hilda’s hands pull Mary’s body closer.

“You’ve fucked me six nights in a row,” Hilda breathes. “And I’d rather fuck you.”

“Finally you speak truth,” Mary says.


	4. Chapter 4

But Mary laughs into Hilda’s mouth regardless.

Their mouths don’t touch, barely.

Their bodies do touch, barely.

Mary says,

“You speak truth so far as you know it. But little do you know—”

Hilda digs fingers into ribs, says,

“You might be surprised.” Mary hisses, says,

“I doubt it.”

Mary closes in, envelopes, encompasses. They kiss, a fever that’s attempting to burn a poison out. But the fire instead refines. Mary is at her purest form as she pulls back and says,

“You’re a neglected resource. I can hardly believe they haven’t yet bottled your essence.” Hilda leans her head back on the armchair, sighs.

“And I suppose that’s your answer? The reason you’ve been invading my dreams is that I’m some untapped natural resource? Fucking and fracking are the same to you?” She shifts her body, attempts to extricate herself.

But Mary captures Hilda’s wrists, presses her knees more firmly into the armchair on the outside of Hilda’s legs. She brings a hand to her mouth, kisses a knuckle.

“You think too much. You’re an intuitive creature, and you ought to capitalize on that,” Mary says. Hilda scoffs.

“That’s what people say to other people they think are too stupid to understand the world,” Hilda says. Mary looks at her, really looks, says,

“In your limited experience, perhaps.” She takes that knuckle she’d just kissed and straightens it, and the finger closest to it, and puts both in her velvety mouth. She licks the length of them, sucks gently, and then makes a show of pulling them out. “But what experience have you had with someone like me?”

Hilda doesn’t try to compose herself, says pantingly,

“Six nights in a row—” Mary guides those fingers that were so recently in her mouth down her torso and then thighs to the hem of her robe, says,

“Six nights in a row of fantasy.” Mary guides the fingers beneath her robe, up her thigh again. “But here we are in reality.”

Hilda gasps. One of her hands is still locked at the wrist by Wardwell’s firm grip, and the other is exploring silky skin but also in Wardwell’s firm grip.

“I don’t trust you,” Hilda says.

“Nor should you,” Mary says, releasing one wrist so that she can fist Hilda’s hair, still guiding her other hand up her thigh.

Hilda uses her newly released hand to untie Mary’s robe and snake inside to her breasts.

“But you trust me enough for this,” Mary says, finally guiding Hilda’s hand to her vulva. She releases the grip on her wrist, then, and arches into the forced touch.

“No,” Hilda says. Hilda retracts her fingers there.

They look at each other.

“I thought you wanted to fuck me,” Mary says.

“Yes, but these are your terms. This is your turf, as it were. This is all…”

“Not how you’d imagined it.”

xxx

It’s all a country-western song.

It’s all walking bass and heartache and wailing.

She couldn’t fathom.

Yet she did fathom.

Fathoming the fathomless.

xxx

She hadn’t imagined anything in particular.

But if she had.


	5. Chapter 5

The first night was mild.

In the dream, Hilda sat in her parlor working on a needlepoint, and Mary sat down next to her, asked her about her stitches and thread, kissed her gently, made careful love to her on the couch.

The second night, the needlepoint was more intricate, the lovemaking more passionate.

And after that, there was no pretense of needlepoint.

Third night hot tub.

Fourth night alley behind a seedy bar.

Fifth night Church of Night orgy.

Sixth night Hilda’s bed as Zelda watches.

Freud might say so much.


	6. Chapter 6

“Why do you think I’ve imagined anything at all?” Hilda says.

Mary looks at her, groans.

“Why must you tease me so?”

They look at each other, both groaning now.

“I’m only teasing you as much as you’ve teased me,” Hilda says.

“I haven’t ever teased you, my dear. I will follow up on any or all promises I’ve ever implied.”

Again they look at each other.

“I need to get back home,” Hilda says.

They once more look at each other, but Mary decides something, pins her, says,

“You won’t believe me in your own dreams, and you won’t believe me in my own house. We need a neutral location.”

“I don’t drive,” Hilda says.

“You drove here,” Mary says.

“Against my better judgment.”

xxx

They’re at a mortal hotel bar in south Greendale a few nights later.

Hilda knows chamomile and whiskey won’t treat her right. She orders a pinot noir. She drinks one and a half before Mary Wardwell appears, ordering a gin and tonic. There is a live band, and it is horrible.

“Would you care to dance?” Mary says.

“Absolutely not,” Hilda says.

“Good. I’ve already got a room,” Mary says.

They take the stairs.

And the room is clinically clean and anonymous. Mary sits on the bed, says,

“Is this different enough for you to believe it?”

Hilda casts her eyes to every corner.

“Everything is different. Everything is the same. But I do remember very vividly taking the bus. So.”

Mary Wardwell laughs, says,

“If I’d known public transportation was the way into your knickers—”

“Oh please,” Hilda sighs as she rolls her eyes. “You’ll fuck anything with a pulse.”

Mary grabs her collar and pulls her onto the bed, pushes at her shoulders:

“No,” Mary says. “I eat a lot of men, but I don’t allow myself witches unless I really want them.”

Mary folds her body into Hilda’s, a leg here, hands there, mouth exact.

“No,” Mary says again. “I want you because I want you. And I wouldn’t care if you didn’t have a pulse.”


	7. Chapter 7

But Hilda does have a pulse. And it’s racing. 

She wants Mary so badly she can hardly stand herself, can hardly think. She doesn’t know if it’s the dreams or the reality.

xxx

“What’s a girl like you doing in a place like this?” Mary leered too close to Hilda’s face.

“How cliche,” Hilda said, playing with the stem of the cherry in the frilliest drink this seedy bar offered.

“I don’t mind being cliche if it works.”

They looked at each other.

Approximately three conversational exchanges later, they were outside in the alley, Hilda against the brick wall, Mary on her knees.

“Is it too cliche to say you taste divine?”

“I don’t really know what’s cliche and what’s divine.”

Mary’s tongue tried her best to not be cliche but divine. Hilda climaxed anyway.

She wakes up sweaty and angry and sore.

xxx

“Let go of me,” Hilda says.

Mary does and watches and waits.

xxx

It’s all a country-western song.

It’s all what it’s not. Metaphor and steel guitar.

xxx

“Do what you’re going to do,” Mary says.

“I’ll take my time, thanks,” Hilda says.


	8. Chapter 8

They shift together but separately on the scratchy comforter. They’re now both on their sides, staring at each other.

“You wanted a neutral zone,” Hilda says.

“No. You needed a neutral zone,” Mary says.

“And I suppose I needed you six nights in a row to—”

“Far more than that if—” 

Hilda’s faster than she looks.

She’s on top of Mary, pinning her arms to the mattress.

“Don’t hurt yourself doing calculations; you’re not a math teacher.” She thrusts a knee between Mary’s legs, rocks once to test the waters. Mary’s eyes have widened, and her mouth is half open. She looks as though she’d been about to smirk but had been jostled out of it by lust.

“You’re right, aren’t you, Miss Spellman? I’m certainly not a math teacher.” Hilda clenches her fists around Mary’s arms, feels her nails dig in. Just a bit more pressure, and they’ll have to pay more for the hotel room. But what does she care? It’s on Mary’s tab. She rocks again and dips down to kiss that half-smirking mouth. It’s a hard kiss, unfriendly. But they’d never really been friends anyhow. She stops abruptly, refastens her mouth to Mary’s neck instead, drags her teeth.

“I don’t own any turtlenecks, Miss Spellman.”

“I’m sure you look lovely in scarves, Miss Wardwell.” Hilda bites down. Mary hisses.

“I’m not sure you know what you’re getting yourself into, Miss Spellman.”

Hilda releases her arms, begins unbuttoning Mary’s blouse, bats her eyelashes sweetly.

“And I know damn good and well by now that you’re not going to tell me anything. Might as well find out for myself.” Mary laughs and helps her with the buttons.

xxx

Mary was already submerged to the neck.

Hilda found herself standing nude on the concrete, the lighting a kaleidoscopic blur of obscene Roman colors, a mostly empty bathhouse, crumbling and ancient and familiar and foreign.

“You look cold,” Mary said.

“That’s because you’re staring at my tits.” Hilda was sure it was her voice although not quite something she would say without giggling, which she hadn’t.

“Who wouldn’t be?” Mary said.

Hilda entered the water to escape the scrutiny. But there was no escape. Heat and wetness and searching.

She wakes up and still smells chlorine. Is still damp.

xxx

Mary is half naked beneath her, not panting or writhing quite as much as she’d like. She’s suddenly suspicious, self-conscious. She removes her teeth from a nipple, says,

“All right, Miss Wardwell?” Mary looks at her, cocks her head.

“Yes. But that’s the problem.” She sighs. “I’m afraid you set yourself up for failure.” Hilda sits up on her knees.

“Excuse me?”

“You start off with all this scratching and biting, but when you get to it, well. Just as I suspected, you’re a lamb. I’m sure you’d rather I read you some Emily Dickinson as I played with your hair.”

Hilda knows she’s being manipulated, but she lets it happen anyway. She grabs a fistful of Mary’s hair, forces her tongue in her mouth. She bites and bruises and slips a hand beneath her skirt, rends silk as she plunges two fingers into a very ready opening. Yes, Wardwell had been bluffing. Hilda’s not mad about it. She pushes and pushes. And finally Mary moans. Hilda guides a leg onto her shoulder and moves down.

“‘Wild nights, wild nights,’” Hilda breathes onto Mary’s thigh as she descends.

xxx

Hilda can’t remember the last time she’s heard a country-western song.

But she thinks maybe some of them are happy.

Fathoming the fathomless.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As you well might’ve guessed, my writing continues to be a clumsy vehicle for dialogue. So.


	9. Chapter 9

Julie London is on the record player, and Zelda is filing her nails over an Algerian newspaper when Hilda walks in.

“You ought to get a drivers’ license again,” Zelda says.

“I took the bus,” Hilda says. Zelda doesn’t look up, keeps filing.

“I know.”

“I haven’t driven since—”

“I know,” Zelda says again, looks up, looks into her.

“The Big One was hard for everyone, especially—”

“Shush,” Zelda says. “I know, damn it.”

They look at each other, and Hilda pretends it’s about what had been rather than what is currently.

“I need a bath,” Hilda says.

“I know,” Zelda says. “But you still ought to get a current drivers’ license. Just in case.”

“Just in case of what?” 

They look at each other, inspect each other.

“If you don’t know already, I’m not going to tell you,” Zelda says.

xxx

Hilda was lying in bed.

Her breath was deep and long, the breath of a person almost asleep.

Her half-asleep brain watched the window.

The window opened, slowly, slowly. And a figure creeped in, a shadow at first and then less of a shadow and more of a figure.

She stayed still, silent, waiting, watching. And the shadow or figure still creeped. 

Until it was there beside her. Definitely more a figure than shadow.

“What are you doing here?” Hilda whispered in the dark to the figure that wasn’t a shadow.

“If you don’t know already, I’m not going to tell you,” Mary Wardwell said.

They didn’t exchange any more words.

Just this and just that and just the fathoms of the fathomless as Zelda looked on, yearning.

xxx

“I’d prefer coffee,” Zelda says as Hilda pours tea.

“You’ll get what you get,” Hilda says.


	10. Chapter 10

The dreams have stopped.

It’s been a week of blessed nothing.

Hilda closes her eyes on a night and opens them on a day, and she breathes easily about it.

She’s looking through an unsolicited catalogue, thinking about buying a pair of goats or maybe some insulated long underwear, when the thought hits her and she laughs.

“‘Far more than that’! Ha! One night at a hotel and I’ve already got you out of my system!” She says it out loud and then checks herself, checks the porch. No one’s there to hear her, but she bites the inside of her cheek to silence herself anyway.

She doesn’t think about how she’d gone to the county courthouse and taken her drivers test day before yesterday. She also doesn’t think about why that woman had been in her system in the first place. Or how that woman had known she’d been in her system and inserted herself further into her system so that she’d have to be gotten taken care of in some way or another.

She thinks instead about the goats and decides on the long underwear.

xxx

An exorcism, a new job. Distractions, dilutions, delusions.

Barbara Mandrell is on the record player.

Crystal Gayle is on the record player.

Kitty Wells is on the record player.

When had she become so fond of country-western music?

A fathom of the fathomless, and even more cheating songs.

xxx

Hilda closes her eyes.

She expects to open them again to day.

But she dreams instead.


	11. Chapter 11

It was 1942. Ish.

Hilda was laughing and smoking and counting the ration cards she’d just won in a poker game.

And then the call had come in.

She hopped into the driver's seat of the ambulance.

Rough terrain. Lights and darkness. Rubble and concrete. She drove and drove. Crumbling buildings and bodies. So many bodies.

She arrived.

She helped.

She drove.

xxx

Hilda wakes and sweats.

It’s 3 am, and it’s regular but still terrible.

She has Loretta Lynn stuck in her head.

xxx

She has Patsy Cline stuck in her head.

But that’s regular. That’s what everyone expects.

And by everyone she means...


	12. Chapter 12

“Must we?” Zelda says as she enters the kitchen.

A grease bubble pops, and Hilda just very narrowly misses it as she rearranges the bacon.

“You love bacon,” Hilda says.

“Not that.” Zelda snaps her fingers, and Patsy Cline abruptly halts her midnight walk on the record player.

“You know very well—”

“I know. You’ve been talking in your sleep.” 

“That’s Crystal Gayle,” Hilda says, turning to the pancake batter. 

Hilda jumps when Zelda laughs.

“I’m not calling in a request. I’m telling you.” She sits and lights a cigarette. “If I hear one more dobro lick I will strangle you.” 

Hilda throws up her hands.

“What do you suggest I do, then, hmm?” 

Zelda raises an eyebrow.

“The same three chords and atonal moaning will get you only so far. And in this house, they’re likely to get you killed before you even get as far as they might take you.” Zelda shakes out her newspaper, licks her finger to turn the page. Hilda flips a pancake and then snaps her fingers. Patsy resumes her stroll. Their eyes meet.

“I’ll take my chances,” Hilda says.

“That’s Mary Chapin Carpenter,” Zelda says.

Zelda doesn’t jump when Hilda laughs.

xxx

She doesn’t want to test it, but she does anyway.

It’s Tammy Wynette who gets her killed. There are worse people to die for.

xxx

She doesn’t want to test it, but she does anyway.

She’s grief-exhausted. A family’s young child had died, and she had prepared the body, peppered the parents with apologies. She is all necessary paperwork and welcome sympathy, a perfect mortician. 

And so tired.

She falls asleep shortly after the funeral. It had been the first time in three decades she’d driven the hearse to the cemetery.

She falls asleep shortly after the funeral, right there in the overly warm driver's seat back in her own driveway.

xxx

She couldn’t tell whether it was a hearse or an ambulance.

She was immediately upset.

She didn’t like or trust lucid dreaming, but this was her punishment for napping, she supposed in the dream.

Well, since she was lucid, she might as well do something. She opened the door and stumbled out.

There was the rubble. There were the bodies. 

But there also was her home, looming in the background, much farther away than it had been when she’d parked before she had stupidly slept. She inspected the vehicle she’d half fallen out of: the hearse with ambulance markings, a cherry on top. She rolled her eyes at her own subconscious and began walking toward the ever-receding front door of her house. 

It’d be faster to drive. So she clambered back in, not to the modern black leather she’d exited but a stiff, straight-backed bench seat and five on the column. Familiar and unfamiliar, old and new, comfortably foreign. 

Dream regular. Terrible and expected.

“Hell’s bells!” she said, even as her muscle memory depressed the clutch and shifted into first.

“I’ve been there. Very few bells to speak of,” Mary Wardwell said from the passenger seat.

Hilda threw it inelegantly back into neutral and yanked the parking brake. She looked at Mary, in uniform coveralls and a cap.

“Your hair is not within regulation,” Hilda said. Mary ran her fingers through it. Hilda thought she was merely pretending to think as she said,

“This is your dream. You could’ve fixed that.” Mary leaned closer, said softer. “But you didn’t.”

“This is not the dream you’re supposed to be in,” Hilda said. Mary laughed.

“I was under the impression I wasn’t supposed to be in any of your dreams.” 

Hilda blinked, thought, blinked again. Dream Hilda and Lucid Dream Hilda were at odds just then. She could see certain outcomes, and other she could see certain other outcomes.

“Quite right, quite right,” Hilda said. It remained to be seen which Hilda had said it, but regardless, she maneuvered the vehicle back into first.

It must have been Dream Hilda.

Clutch, gas, second.

Clutch, gas, third.

Clutch, gas, fourth.

And they were in London, zipping toward somewhere that definitely wasn’t the Spellman Mortuary. Mary’s not-regulation hair was blowing haphazardly and very attractively in the brisk breeze from the open window.

“How many ration cards do I have to give you to stop this fucking thing?” Mary finally said, bracing herself by gripping the steel frame.

“How many do you have?” Hilda said, punching it into fifth.

Mary’s hand was suddenly on her thigh.

“This is your dream. I have as much or as little as you’ll allow.”

“Don’t remind me,” Hilda said.

Clutch and brakes.

And they were back in the driveway.

Mary’s hand was still on her thigh:

“What would you like me to do instead?”

xxx

Hilda gasps awake.

The car is cold now.

She walks into the house and doesn’t even take off her coat before she starts dusting.

She puts on a Maria Callas record.

xxx

Country-western is all cheating and lamentation.

Opera is worse. A fathom in three acts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I just can’t get the idea of Hilda as a WWII ambulance driver out of my head. Sorry not sorry.


	13. Chapter 13

Opera is all masked balls and love triangles and murder and misunderstandings.

It’s worse and better.

But more importantly, it’s loud.

xxx

She cleans and cleans.

There is nothing more to clean.

She drives and drives.

But she stops at the woods. 

She parks at the edge of the wood. There’s nowhere else, after all.

xxx

“Miss Spellman, what a pleasant surprise.”

Mary Wardwell opens the heavy wooden door. There is no squeak, no blinking. A neutral door. A neutral opening. But neutral is nothing, and nothing is neutral.

“Is it, though?” Hilda says.

Mary takes her coat, hangs it without any seduction, says,

“Pleasant, yes. Surprise, no.”

She walks to her living room, but instead of sitting in an armchair, she drops to her knees, maneuvers an iron poker, and stokes the fire.

Hilda follows and stands in the middle of the room.

“Miss Wardwell,” she says. Mary looks over her shoulder at her. “We’ve established you’re a very powerful witch. But it remains to be seen why you’ve decided it necessary to invade my dreams.”

Mary bats her eyelashes sweetly, says,

“Who is ‘we’?”

They look at each other.

“That’s nothing of consequence,” Hilda says. “The important thing is why you’ve—”

Mary has stood up, has closed the distance between them, is now standing over Hilda and breathing into her face as she says,

“The important thing is that you’re here.”

Mary traces a finger over Hilda’s collarbone.

Hilda follows her to her bedroom.

xxx

Opera and country-western coalesce. They’re the same themes by different media.

The same fathoms fathoming with different instrumentation.

xxx

“I didn’t want that dream in the first place, and in the second place, I absolutely didn’t want you in it.”

Mary smirks and shrugs off her robe.

“And yet there you were, and there I was, and here you are, and here I am.”

Mary reaches back and unclasps her bra, lets it fall.

Hilda allows herself a look and then,

“How dare you use your magic to pry into me. How dare you—”

Mary slides out of her panties.

“Might I remind you that you’re the one in my home watching me undress.”

“I wouldn’t be if you hadn’t—”

“Woulds coulds shoulds. We’re here and now.”

Hilda knows she’s being manipulated, but she lets it happen anyway.

She watches Mary’s hands as they descend upon her cardigan, dexterous and knowing and gentle, smoothing down the soft fabric to slowly unbutton. Hilda could still say no. But she’s here and now.

When the cardigan is gone, Hilda throws off her own blouse, fairly jumps out of her skirt.

And then soon they’re standing there nude, not touching each other. A bolt of lightning out the window and then five seconds later the thunder, and still they’re merely staring at each other, neither flinching. Mary speaks first,

“We’re both naked. Seems a shame to waste it.”

Another flash of lightning. Hilda doesn’t count the seconds this time, but the thunder comes quickly after.

“I don’t intend for this to become routine. We’re not a thing,” Hilda says.

Mary laughs.

“Is that what you’re worried about?” Mary says. She cocks her head and then sits on the bed. Hilda stares at her for a moment as the rain begins to fall. A few big, hard drops at first and then a sheet. Hilda situates herself on Mary’s lap, runs her hands over her arms, ends with gripping her hair, pulling just so that they’re looking at each other.

“Listen, Miss Wardwell. I’ll fuck you anytime you want. I’ll be available for you anytime you want to fuck me. But the dreams have got to stop.”

“You drive a hard bargain,” Mary says. Hilda bucks her hips, and Mary hisses.

“Oh very hard indeed. Can we shake on it?”

The rain waxes, wanes, waxes again. Mary says,

“There’s a reason I wanted you in the first place.”

“It wasn’t just my tits?” Hilda says, suppressing a giggle at the word.

Mary kisses her then, hard. They kiss, tongues and teeth and tongues again. Mary pulls away, drags her mouth down to Hilda’s throat, then collarbone, then nipple. Hilda’s hands are still in her hair, and they both moan. Hilda removes one hand so she can use it to drift across Mary’s cheekbone and land on her neck, scratching lightly, and then moving to rest on a shoulder, digging in. Mary bites her, and she cries out, clenches more firmly at scalp and trapezius.

“Will that count as a handshake?” Mary says, fluttering her eyelashes up from her position at Hilda’s breast.

“Time will tell,” Hilda says as she pulls again at Mary’s hair, plunges her nails into her shoulder. Mary responds with renewed fervor, biting the other nipple.

The rain is raining consistently. It’s cold and steady. But it’s outside. Inside, however…

Hilda rocks her hips, fists Mary’s hair, digs into Mary’s shoulder.

And then they’re kissing again, and Hilda is shoving Mary down onto the bed.

Hilda’s hand releases the shoulder, explores instead soft flesh, navigates its way down and down. Hilda finds a soaked center and circles it with two fingers.

“If only all handshakes—” Mary begins but halts as Hilda enters her, prying and seeking, and Mary moans, 

“More!”

So Hilda adds another finger, thrusts harder.

Mary Wardwell is writhing and panting beneath her just as she likes. No Emily Dickinson necessary.

Mary is close. She adds a thumb to her clit.

Mary screeches, becomes rigid beneath her, convulses, collapses.

As Mary struggles against unconsciousness, Hilda says in her ear,

“No more dreams, yeah?”

“We’re not a thing. No promises,” Mary says.

The rain is unrelenting.


	14. Chapter 14

“You look like shit,” Zelda says.

“How kind of you to notice,” Hilda says as she hangs her coat.

It’s four in the morning, and neither should be awake, but here they are: Zelda smoking in the dim kitchen, lit haphazardly by candles and lightning flashes and Hilda unsuccessfully sneaking in the front door, sex bedraggled and half dreaming still.

Hilda flops into a chair at the kitchen table, soaking from the rain.

“Did you take care of it?” Zelda says. She lights another cigarette on the cherry of the previous.

They’re not acknowledging this. They’re not talking about this. But they are in their way. 

Hilda extends herself, takes Zelda’s cigarette. She puffs once, twice, sighs, returns it to Zelda’s fingers.

“Time will tell,” Hilda says. 

Their fingers brush at the exchange, and Zelda shivers slightly. Hilda does not shiver, says, 

“But time has proven to be on my side more times than not.”

They blink at each other in this place safe from rain.

“A blessing and a curse,” Zelda says.

Thunder echoes.

xxx

An unrelenting rain pours and pours.

There is no accompanying country-western song.

There is no accompanying aria.

No fathoms whatsoever.

xxx

Hilda sleeps and wakes.

It’s all blank, and she breathes easily.

Until it isn’t and she doesn’t.

A fathom is six feet.

Six feet is the depth of death.

xxx

Hilda sleeps in her own bed maybe a yard away from Zelda in their shared room.

Hilda dreams in her own bed maybe a yard away from Zelda in their shared room.

Zelda dreams and sleeps, too. A yard, a fathom away.

xxx

Hilda awakens rested and open.

There have been no dreams.

She should like that, but she doesn’t. There is a sense of foreboding.

No dreams tonight.

But dreams are there on the edge.

Possibilities and impossibilities. Fathoms.

xxx

Hilda fries bacon, brews coffee.

It’s still raining.


	15. Chapter 15

No dreams for several days and then.

It stops raining.

xxx

Hilda was on a beach, warm and content, gnawing on a turkey leg.

“Give me a bite,” Mary’s voice somewhere said.

“No.” 

Mary—no longer disembodied—crouched down on the garishly cheerful blanket and shoved her face right across the bone from Hilda, took a bite anyway.

“What did you mean when you said you eat men?” Hilda said around a tendon, their lips so close, mutually smeared with grease.

“That’s nothing of consequence,” Mary said. Hilda pushed the drumstick farther into Mary’s obscene mouth and stood up.

“I’m going for a swim.”

“I don’t think you are, darling.” Hilda turned, saw the sea. It had a moment ago been blue and serene, and now it was black and choppy and dangerous. “Would you like to know what you’re doing instead?”

“I’m sure I won’t need three guesses. But wake me up and meet me in the parlor. I do hate getting sand places it oughtn’t be.”

xxx

Hilda starts awake sitting upright on the settee in the parlor. 

She hadn’t fallen asleep there.

Her first thought is that this is getting out of control. But then she supposes that’s what she had signed up for when she had told a woman who can waltz casually through her dreams that she was available to her. 

There’s no light rapping, just a burst of chill but mercifully silent wind when the door opens and closes, also silent as a grave, and Mary stalks into the parlor.

“You ought to keep that locked,” Mary whispers, climbing directly onto Hilda’s lap.

“I ought a lot of things.”

Mary kisses her, ravenous and harsh. She then pulls back and begins unbuttoning her blouse, abandons that and opens Hilda’s robe instead, rips her cotton nightgown easily to palm her breasts, kisses her again, begins grinding her hips. Hilda responds. She’s kissing, too; she’s scratching at Mary’s back; she’s thrusting her chest into Mary’s hands, jutting her hips into Mary’s hips. But she’s confused nonetheless. Mary’s lips leave hers, trail along her jaw sloppily, are applying pressure, suction to her neck.

“Satan! What’s got you so worked up?” Hilda pants. Mary’s lips barely stop what they’re doing to drawl,

“The Feast of Feasts always gets me worked up.” And then they’re back to work, wet and soft and firm on Hilda’s neck and then shoulder. But Hilda’s gone stiff. She hadn’t wanted to think about that nonsense until she absolutely had to. Mary kisses her neck gently now, just once, and then raises her head. “But you’re not that kind of girl, I suppose.”

“No,” Hilda says. They stare at each other for a moment, and Mary’s eyes are sparkling in the dim light with something Hilda isn’t sure is quite right. Mary smiles, and Hilda feels the same about the smile as she does the eyes. But Mary’s hands are now stroking her hair.

“I am very selfish and very wicked and do so enjoy a good cannibalistic ritual. But I also thought. Maybe you’d feel better going into it if you’d had a good lay recently.” Hilda rolls her eyes.

“How considerate.”

“May I resume?”

“Well, my nightgown’s already ruined. You might as well.” 

Mary manages only a half a laugh before her lips are again on Hilda’s. The nightgown rips further, and Mary’s pinching a nipple, then stroking ribs. Her other hand is at the base of Hilda’s skull, fingers pressing at her occipital ridge. 

Hilda wonders how Mary seems to know she needs that release even more than a sexual one. Mary whispers the answer to the unvoiced question in her ear,

“No magic. It’s just in the way you hold your jaw.”

Mary continues pressing, continues stroking, continues rutting, and Hilda moans against her.

“There now,” Mary says. “Now we can get down to it.” She removes the fingers from her skull, slides them down her neck, and now both hands are teasing nipples as she grinds and grinds and kisses her mouth with ferocity. 

Mary’s body is generally a few degrees hotter than Hilda’s, but now it’s veritably burning. Hilda doesn’t know whether she should shimmy her hands beneath her blouse for fear of hurting herself on the preternaturally warm skin, so she continues grasping at her clothed back and pulling her closer. Mary twists a nipple hard, and Hilda moans into her mouth,

“Are you going to fuck me already or what?” She can feel Mary’s smirk against her mouth.

“I’ve also noticed the way you walk. Your sacrum needs an adjustment, as well.”

“I should know by now you’re just one obfuscation after another, but I’d still have preferred if you would’ve told me you intended to give me a chiropractic evaluation rather than an orgasm.” 

Hilda’s proud of herself for not giggling about the word. But Mary’s eyes are glinting as she takes the frayed edges of the nightgown in her hands and rends it completely even as she’s pushing Hilda to lie down on the settee. She rips off her own blouse, bra, closes in.

“I assure you I do not have an x-ray machine in my handbag. And I also assure you I can adjust you much better from the inside.” Hilda doesn’t even have time to say, “Oh!” before Mary’s tongue is in her mouth, their naked torsos touching. Hilda squirms against the heat.

xxx

The Church of Night was uncomfortably hot.

Hilda was sweating in her bustier and looking around with unseeing eyes at the bodies writhing around her. A blur of bodies. But no death this time. Just sex. She couldn’t smell it, but it was heavy around her and in her, pulsating.

She looked down at her dream body. Real Hilda, at the edges of her subconscious, was thinking about how if she must dream of orgies she should’ve at least swapped her paunch for a sexier physique. But Dream Hilda was thinking she was a total fox.

And dream everyone else was apparently thinking the same. Dream Zelda eyed her. Dream Prudence winked. Dream Faustus made an obscene hand gesture. Dream that guy she liked in 8th grade licked his lips. 

But Dream Hilda ignored everyone, walked purposefully through the nude, beautiful people—confident and strident—until she was right in front of Mary Wardwell, who seemed indifferent and aloof and was fully clothed.

“Well?” Dream Hilda said. Mary took a drink of her martini, then,

“Well, well, well.”

“Do what you’re going to do,” Hilda said. Mary looked her up and down.

“You must mean whom I’m going to do.” Hilda looked herself up and down and then Mary down and then up.

“Same difference,” Hilda said.

xxx

Mary’s taut nipples are pinpricks of sensation on Hilda’s chest, and Mary’s tongue fills her mouth, speaks without speaking. 

Mary’s cunt is even hotter than the rest of her, boring into Hilda’s pubic bone at regular, maddening intervals.

And then Mary’s over-heated body is gone.

Mary is standing next to her supine form, releasing herself from a tight skirt, red satin panties, and she’s saying,

“Take off your clothes.”

Hilda complies. She throws the remnants of her nightgown and her intact heavy robe across the parlor, and it all congeals in a corner with Scrabble and Balderdash.

Mary eyes her, analyzes. And then she takes several locks of Hilda’s hair in her hand and drags her by them onto the rug. She’s immediately on her again.

“The divan was too small,” Mary says.

Tongues, teeth, fingers, hips, vulvas.

Mary’s body is still too hot to be comfortable, but Hilda takes her chances. Her fingers dig into hips, pulling and pulling. It burns, but it’s a pleasant burn.

“The divan was too small,” Hilda says around Mary’s insistent lips. “But now we’ve got enough space.”

Mary sighs and drags an index finger up Hilda’s naked thigh.

“Yes,” Mary says. “We have enough space.”

Two fingers are inside Hilda, and Hilda groans.

xxx

Hilda looks.

Mary looks.

They look.

They look together and separately.

A fathom away from each other.

A fathom toward each other.

xxx

They’re undulating against each other on the floor, and Mary is moaning.

They’re both moaning.

Indecent. A fathom.

xxx

“Fuck!” Hilda says as Mary penetrates and penetrates, curls and unfurls.

They’re on the parlor floor, and Mary’s fingers are so intense. Her hips behind the fingers are so intense. And Hilda is beneath her, bucking and moaning and begging.

Paroxysm.

Victorian yellow wallpaper and also not that.

Hilda’s hundred lifetimes versus Mary’s thousand lifetimes.

They are and they are not.

They both shudder. They both enjoy.

And then Mary is gone, and Hilda is asleep in her own bed.

xxx

Sun rather than shower.

And Hilda is not ready for Zelda to offer herself as Queen for the Feast of Feasts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sure, Mary Wardwell helps Sabrina find a witch who has escaped the Feast of Feasts. But let’s be real: Lilith does what she wants and whatever serves her own interests.


	16. Chapter 16

Hilda is late to breakfast.

The toaster hums, and the coffee percolates, and she flops into a chair instead of overseeing any of it.

“You certainly look… relaxed,” Zelda says. Sabrina looks at her.

“Yeah,” Sabrina says. “And is that a different nightgown—”

“Yep. Accidentally. Um. Ripped. The old one.” 

They all look at one another.

“Is that what you were yelling about last night?” Zelda says.

“Yep. Very upset about that nightgown. Loved that nightgown. Who wants eggs?” Hilda says, rising swiftly and hustling to the refrigerator.

“No one wants eggs,” Zelda says.

“Well I do,” Hilda says.

“Funny. In the past, on the day of the Lottery when I would be Tribute, you would make whatever breakfast I preferred,” Zelda says.

“But that’s just every day now, isn’t it?” Sabrina laughs and pretends she’s choking to cover. Zelda dramatically turns the page on her newspaper. Hilda blinks and blinks again, reins herself in. “What would you like, sister?” Zelda looks at her over the top of the newspaper, penetrates.

“Over easy,” Zelda hisses.

xxx

The whole week is enough of a fever dream that Hilda figures her subconscious will let her rest.

She’s already acquiesced to Mary, so she figures she can rest from that, too.

She is wrong on both accounts.

xxx

Hilda was driving her ambulance along a river. It wasn’t the Thames but it also wasn’t not the Thames.

She cursed and shifted into a higher gear.

And then the ambulance was spinning, spiraling out of control. This was not how she drove in real life. But in the dream it felt inevitable.

The vehicle skidded to a stop next to a pile of rubble.

Hilda was suddenly walking. Boot heels plunging into the recently deceased. A taste of well-marbled sirloin in her mouth. But Real Hilda at the edges of her consciousness knew good and well steak was beyond Dream Hilda’s rations. It must’ve been something else, and neither Real Hilda nor Dream Hilda wanted to consider those implications.

The regulation boots were gone, and now Dream Hilda’s bare feet felt bare bodies and then sand. She was at the edge of the river. A river. Some river. And there was a voice in her ear:

“It’s over, you know.”

“It’s never over,” Hilda said. A tongue in the shell of her ear.

“It’s over for now, though,” Mary Wardwell said.

“I’d rather meet you at your place,” Hilda said.

“I’d rather that, too.”

xxx

Hilda drives more like Dream Hilda than she’d like to admit.

But the hearse is an automatic rather than a standard, and she careens more elegantly through the dense wood than anyone would’ve put money on.

xxx

Hilda knocks on the door.

She doesn’t think about how well-aligned her hips are, how her cranials feel in sync and perfect.

xxx

Mary opens the door.

“Hi,” Mary says.

“Hi,” Hilda says.

The door is closed.

They look at each other.

Hilda knows. Mary knows. 

They both know what fathoms exist between them.

xxx

“I’d prefer—” Hilda starts.

“No you wouldn’t,” Mary says.

xxx

It’s all a country-western cheating song.

It’s all the fathoms it isn’t.

xxx

“You want me, and I want you. It’s ok,” Mary says.

It isn’t, though.

It is, though.

It is and isn’t. Yellow wallpaper. Paroxysm.

Their own beds afterward.

xxx

Hilda knows what it feels like to have her throat slit.

Hilda knows how it feels to die and to live again after.

Hilda knows a lot of things.

Hilda decides to go to Mary with this knowledge.


	17. Chapter 17

“I want to talk about necromancy,” Hilda says.

They’re at the hotel bar again. A different awful live band is playing, Pat Benatar covers tonight.

“Necromancy?” Mary says. She makes a show of licking her lips, of eyeing Hilda. “We won’t even make it to the room at this rate.” Hilda giggles but tries to turn it into a scoff.

“No, really. I want to talk.”

“Might I remind you, we’re not a thing,” Mary says as she recrosses her legs, angles them so she’s touching Hilda.

“Hmm.” Hilda takes a swig of her bottled foreign beer. “And yet you keep turning up in my dreams.”

“And yet you keep turning up in my bed.”

They stare at each other, just a second too long to be friendly.

“I’d rather talk to Zelda anyway,” Hilda says, slapping a wad of cash onto the bar and making to stand. Mary places a hand over hers and cocks her head.

“You might.” She rubs her thumb over Hilda’s hand. “You might, indeed. But you’re here.”

They stare at each other again. There’s a fathom between them, but it’s receding, dashing itself against one bank and then the other.

Mary gathers up the cash on the bar and leans close as she places it in the pocket of Hilda’s cardigan.

“I’d rather speak in private,” Mary says to Hilda. Then to the bartender: “Charge it to room 706.”

xxx

Mary does not try to take liberties in the elevator.

But once inside room 706 she is less restrained. She turns on the bedside lamp and then is immediately removing her clothing. Mid-unzipping her skirt, she says,

“What do you have to say about necromancy?” 

Hilda is half-turned away from her, trying to focus her gaze on the complimentary writing tablet on the desk.

“Well for one, it’s dangerous and volatile. It never goes as planned. And for two—” She falters when her periphery catches exposed torso. She fists her hands into her skirt and continues, “For two, Sabrina’s got it in her head—”

“Darling. No teenagers. I get enough of those at work. Stick to the necromancy.”

Hilda takes a breath, tries to extricate Sabrina from the topic, but Sabrina is the only reason she’d wanted to talk about it in the first place. But of course, Sabrina isn’t her first encounter with it. Not by a long shot. Perhaps she’d had a few too many beers before Mary had arrived, and she says automatically,

“It’s funny how intricate it can be and how simple it can be.” It feels like a family secret, and she stiffens. Her periphery sees movement, and then her body feels heat at her left side, breath on her face. She then hears a low voice in her ear:

“Are you still describing necromancy?”

“What else?” Hilda says, still looking toward the stationery, still stationary herself. Mary laughs, and it reverberates from her cochlea to her clit. Hilda closes her eyes at the sensation.

“Almost anything else, honestly,” Mary says. Hilda feels hands at her shoulders turning her. When she opens her eyes, she’s looking at Mary’s scrutinizing face. “Oh,” Mary says. “You have personal experience.”

“Did you think I was just blathering to blather?”

They look at each other.

“Bless it! You’re no better than—” Hilda shouts, preparing herself for a diva storm out. But Mary takes firmer hold of her shoulders, says,

“Of course not. I didn’t know.” She relinquishes a shoulder to trail a thumb over Hilda’s lower lip. “I didn’t know until just now.”

Mary kisses her then, slow but not soft.

xxx

The wallpaper is not yellow.

The song is still a cheating song.

Cheating on whom? In what way? 

A fathom of this, a fathom of that.

Fuck Freud. What does Jung say? (Basement, attic, animus, cognitive function bullshit. Fuck Jung, too.)

xxx

Mary is still kissing her, slow, intense, and is now sliding her hands under the cardigan, pushing it down.

“I really did intend to just talk,” Hilda breathes against Mary’s mouth.

“We all know what they say about good intentions,” Mary says.

xxx

Hilda was in the parlor, comfortably warm, working on a needlepoint depiction of Naomi declaring herself to be Mara.

There was so much agency there, deciding to be called bitterness itself. The incident didn’t appear in the dark scriptures, but she considered it canon anyway.

And one by one her housemates had retired.

And still she worked by firelight.

And Mary climbed in the window.

“Where you go I will go,” Mary said.

“Oh I doubt that,” Hilda said.

“Dare me,” Mary said.

xxx

“Good intentions pave the way to Hell,” Hilda pants, her cardigan and blouse and brassiere long gone, her right nipple being manipulated by Mary’s supple mouth.

“I love a girl who knows the dark scriptures,” Mary says a breath above Hilda’s breast.

“I really know only the popular verses,” Hilda says.

They look at each other.

“I don’t care,” Mary says.

“You wouldn’t rather—” Hilda starts.

“I wouldn’t rather. If you wouldn’t rather.”


	18. Chapter 18

Hilda is lying on Mary Wardwell’s living room rug, nude but no longer panting, staring at but not paying attention to the ceiling.

“Do you have a cigarette?” she says. Mary lights one on the embers of the fire before she adds another log and stokes it. She passes the cigarette to Hilda but doesn’t rejoin her on the floor. She slinks into her robe and slumps into an armchair.

“I believe you wanted to talk about something?” Mary says, lazy and low. Hilda smokes equally lazily.

It’s a week or so after the Thirteen, and Hilda is still a taut spring about it all, waiting for the next thing that might make her bounce to action. She’d come here pretending to need to talk, actually needing carnality and osteopathy.

“I don’t recall mentioning that,” Hilda says. An inhale, an exhale, a stretch to ash into the fireplace.

“Your ribs told me.” 

Hilda holds the cigarette away from her and takes a big breath, holds it, lets it out slowly. If she’d done this before she’d come here, her ribs would’ve ached at the action. But they don’t now. Hilda smiles. She’d gotten both things she actually wanted, and now Mary is encouraging her to do the thing she half wanted. Whatever reservations she has about this arrangement, she also is reaping a lot of benefits. She takes another drag.

“I kissed someone,” Hilda says. It’s not the secret she needs to talk about, but she figures she can overlay her guilt and confusion and anger onto it well enough.

“I know. It was me. Five minutes ago.” Mary’s tone is still lazy.

“Other than you.” Hilda tosses the half-smoked cigarette into the fire.

“Is this a confession? I’m not a priest, we’re not a thing, and I don’t care.” A little less lazy.

Hilda sits up and looks at her. Mary’s so weird, always, but especially now, a special weird glint in her eyes. Mary continues,

“And regardless, that’s not the confession you want to make.” She leans forward and runs a hand through Hilda’s hair. “And regardless, it’s not your confession to make.”

“Who in the actual fuck are you, actually?” Hilda says, and then she claps a hand over her mouth. She has suspected and wondered and fretted, but she has never thought of asking. And now she’s naked and vulnerable and a little too far from the Cain pit to be too impulsive. Mary’s eyes flash even weirder, and then she throws her head back and laughs.

“‘I’m Nobody! Who are you? Are you—Nobody—too?’” Mary says.

xxx

Hilda walked into the kitchen. It was not the kitchen in the Spellman Mortuary but the kitchen of the station house, but the station house kitchen was not as it had been the last time she’d been there in 1945. It held all the same things in all the same places, but it looked old, derelict, decrepit—as if it had been shut up the day she’d resigned and had been deteriorating ever since, all cobwebs and rot.

Mary stood at the counter in the same uniform coveralls and cap and non-regulation hair, perfectly sharp and clean and her. There was a pristine stainless steel bowl full of farm-fresh eggs and a pristine but period-appropriate blender in front of her. 

Mary cracked eggs one after the other into the blender. Hilda counted. Thirteen. Mary splashed in a little Worcestershire.

Hilda sat on a stool across the counter from her and watched her manicured nail press the button for the highest setting—Real Hilda realized watching Mary’s fingers that the dream was in black and white—and the eggs thrashed together and tore apart, reconfigured themselves, the line of Worcestershire swirling like blood down drains in old horror movies.

Mary turned and reached into a cabinet, turned back, pounded two dusty glasses onto the dusty counter. A puff clouded Hilda’s vision for a moment and receded in slow motion.

Mary poured the contents of the blender so carefully and easily, half into each glass. She manipulated Hilda’s fingers onto one and gripped the other.

“Here’s mud in your eye,” she said before she gulped down the contents. Hilda sat stiff with the glass in her hand. Mary stared at her. “You need the strength, Hildegard.” She placed her thumb on her chin and applied pressure so her mouth would open. She curled her fingers around Hilda’s fingers and guided the glass to her lips.

It burned all the way down.

Hilda wakes up freezing. She hears Zelda in the bed across the room flopping around, pulling at covers, shivering. She slips in bed with her, for warmth, for comfort, for strength.

The next night at around the same time, she is not asleep but casting spells alone in a high school.

xxx

“‘Then there’s a pair of us,’” Hilda says.

Mary laughs and tugs at her hair briefly, and then she sits back.

“We don’t have to talk. I already spoke to your ribs.”

“I know,” Hilda says.

“Are you going to say you should go?”

“Should I say that, given your knowledge of who you actually are?”

“‘How dreary—to be—Somebody,” Mary says.

xxx

Hilda does not trust her.

Hilda fucks her again anyway.

There are fathoms and there are cable lengths and there are nautical miles.

And there is sonic and supersonic and there are light years.

Fuck Freud. Fuck Jung. Double fuck Maslow. What does Chuck Yeager say?

xxx

A baby cries as Hilda creeps back into her own home like a burglar.

She wants to creep right back out again and fuck Mary Wardwell for a third time.

She doesn’t. She silently ascends the stairs.

And then she descends them again.

xxx

It’s 3am, and Hilda is sweating and cursing, holding a flashlight between her teeth as she plunges her trowel into the hard ground again and again. This half dead rose bush will capitulate to her if it kills her.

She’s hacking and hacking and digging and digging and pulling and pulling. She knows her triceps will be sore tomorrow. She relishes the idea. She relishes the idea of finding each tendril of root and ripping it from the earth. She relishes the decline and fall of these flowers and thorns, dying slowly and with resistance at the insistence of her fingers.

“Hilda. What on earth,” Zelda says from the porch.

“I couldn’t sleep,” Hilda says, dirt in her mouth.

xxx

The Yule log goes out.

Hilda goes out.

xxx

She decides to say yes to dancing to the shitty mortal band at the hotel.

Mary is weird and familiar and unfamiliar under her hands as they sway to bad Heart covers.

Fathoms, fathoms, fathoms, barracudas.

xxx

“And you’re still not going to tell me who you really are?” Hilda says as they enter the elevator.

“‘To tell one’s name—the livelong June—’” Mary says.

Hilda punches the emergency stop and drops to her knees.

“I’m not a priest, we’re not a thing, and I don’t care,” Hilda says as her mouth connects with Mary’s center.


	19. Chapter 19

They step off the elevator, stumble to the room Mary has acquired, fuck again against the newly closed door. 

xxx

Cheating songs.

Hilda finally gets it.

The fathoms fathom themselves in just the right way, and she gets it.

Freud would be so smug.

xxx

“You’re sure you don’t want to talk,” Mary says. She’s weird and weirdly right.

“I’m sure,” Hilda says, pulling on her clothes, guilty and reeling.

xxx

There’s no baby anymore.

But Hilda still hears it.

Crying.

Crying its own fathoms.

xxx

She pulls up rose bushes.

She comforts and bakes and is.

She fucks Mary Wardwell.

She puts Barbara Mandrell on the record player.

She puts Renee Fleming on the record player.

Country-western and mezzo-soprano fathoms.

Hilda wishes she could like the jazz altos Zelda prefers.

And then she wishes something different entirely.

xxx

Mid-winter is the best time for poetry. It’s all static electricity and romantic barren landscapes.

It’s all records playing at half volume as a fire crackles. Any fire, any crackle.

It’s all whiskey and wishes.

It’s all what it’s not and metaphors and steel guitar that steels itself against the cold. 

xxx

“I do want to talk tonight,” Hilda says as Mary opens her heavy wooden door.

Mary admits her, takes her coat, takes her in.

“But do I want to hear it?” Mary says.

“Regardless, I’ve got to say it,” Hilda says.

Hilda knows. Mary knows. They both know in this knowing moment.

Mary squares her shoulders, juts her breasts, says,

“You’ve got to say what, exactly?”

Hilda stands firm.

“You’re not who you pretend to be,” Hilda says. Mary clenches her jaw. “But neither am I. We’re all nobody.”

“‘How dreary—’”

“Oh quit it,” Hilda says. “I’m tired of Emily Dickinson. Let’s fuck like regular people.”

But they’re not regular people.


	20. Chapter 20

They’d finished at least half an hour ago, but Hilda hasn’t left yet.

They’re on Mary’s back porch seated right next to each other on the porch swing, wrapped in the same blanket, trading swigs of peppermint schnapps. Neither would call this cuddling, and neither would be right about that.

Hilda watches her breath in the night air and can feel Mary staring at her. She turns, and Mary says,

“I have a few things things to say I don’t think you want to hear.” Hilda takes a swig, nods, passes the bottle to Mary, who takes a swig and then, “First, I know we’re not a thing, but I’m not sure I can be even not a thing with anyone who tires of Emily Dickinson.” Hilda laughs, and Mary’s serious face cracks a tad, but then she’s serious again. “Second.” She pauses. This is the real one, and Hilda takes the bottle back. Mary’s fingers are still warm whereas Hilda’s have grown icy. Hilda wants for a moment for Mary to offer to thaw them. Then she remembers she’s supposed to be listening for something she won’t like to hear.

“Second?” Hilda says.

“You should invite me over for dinner.”

“Why?”

Mary purses her lips, cocks her head. She looks thoughtful, but maybe it’s just the starlight. She says,

“I’m beginning to be tempted to answer your questions.”

“So?”

“So I need to do just a tad more research on you. To determine whether that will be beneficial to me.” If they weren’t in the same blanket, Hilda would be up and pacing. She doesn’t know what to do as a replacement, so she takes another drink, and suddenly it’s funny to her instead of offensive. She giggles,

“Quite a clinical way to say you think it’s time to meet my parents.” Mary’s face is still serious and maybe thoughtful. Hilda knows she means something different but doesn’t know what, and she’s a little drunk and doesn’t care. “What do you like to eat?” Mary’s serious face cracks again. Completely this time, raising an eyebrow, smiling.

“I’ve never been dissatisfied with anything you’ve offered before.”

“I do tend to set a good table in any context.” Mary takes the bottle, sets it on the railing, whispers,

“Let me warm up your fingers.”

xxx

Hilda is not late for breakfast. She checks the clock again. No, she’s not late for breakfast.

But Zelda is there in the kitchen, a stack of waffles and a fruit salad in a large stainless steel bowl already beside her, sausage frying, a saucepan of compote in front of her. There is juice and milk. There is butter. There is syrup. And the kitchen is spotless, smelling of disinfectant under the food.

Hilda stands across the counter from her, and she has to shake her head at the memory of the dream with Mary and the blender of eggs that’s threatening to spill over onto the scene.

“All right, Zelds?”

Zelda’s eyes flash to hers. The definition of a fathom. Six feet of dark ocean and unseen danger.

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” she hisses and then pauses. “You know what I do when you’re mysteriously gone at night, Hildegard?”

“Sudoku?” Hilda says. It’s the wrong time for a joke, but she’s so off balance she doesn’t know if she’s joking or not.

“I listen to country-western music.”

“Some of it’s really quite—”

“And when you clambered into this house this morning two hours ago, I thought, why not? Why shouldn’t Hilda have something that’s hers, even if it’s something tawdry and undoubtedly unfulfilling and stupid with a mortal manchild? And, I thought, if cooking calms her, why shouldn’t it calm me? But it hasn’t. Your coping methods don’t work, sister. And I’m sure, through all of your recent experience, you’ve learned mine don’t either.”

Hilda’s confused but piecing things together haphazardly as she goes. Her brain sticks long enough on the last thing that her tongue moves before she can shift to a better gear,

“You know I’m very firmly against flagellation, so I’m not sure—” Both of Zelda’s palms slam down on the counter, and flour flies up as she says,

“You know I meant fucking.”

Hilda’s brain catches that thread, but her mouth laughs before the clutch has even been depressed,

“Oh my stars! Cee? Satan forbid!” She laughs again, and Zelda’s hands are still flat on the counter. No murder implements in immediate reach. But when their eyes meet, Zelda’s become angrier and angrier as she reads Hilda’s face.

“Where have you been, then?”

“The sausage is burning.”

Zelda scrapes all the little cylinders onto a waiting plate and then snaps her fingers, and Barbara Mandrell is on the record player, wailing about the midnight oil. She still has the frying pan in her left hand.

“Where have you been?”

“Whatever happened to my having something that was truly mine?” Hilda says. She figures if she dies now, she could be back by supper time.

“You already have me,” Zelda says.

Hilda gets half a laugh out before—

It’s all dirt and dark and death.

xxx

The death itself is cold.

But the waking is hot.

There’s a lot of friction involved in knitting things back together.

A lot of chemical reactions.

And then the work of climbing out, an obstacle course, sweat and straining of muscles and sinews.

Neurons fire again, and it’s fire in the head.

Hilda could count the times on one hand that she’d climbed out rested and without a fever and headache. Those times had been outliers, times she’d seen ghostly prophetic visions.

Now is not one of those times.

xxx

It’s midday, cold and crisp, and Zelda’s tear-streaked face on the front porch is infuriating in at least four different ways.

Hilda spits the dirt out of her mouth.

“We’re having a guest for dinner Friday,” Hilda says as she reaches for the door handle. “Don’t bother trying to be on your best behavior.”


	21. Chapter 21

Hilda’s scrubbing her own scalp, watching bubbles race each other down the drain, fantasizing about the coziness of the long underwear she’d ordered from the catalogue, when Zelda’s voice breaks through the steam, still ragged from tears:

“I meant it, you know.”

Hilda carefully removes the dirt from under her fingernails, says equally carefully,

“You say a lot of things and mean a lot of things.”

Freud is probably rolling his eyes as he rolls in his grave.

xxx

Hilda is disemboweling.

There are no more rose bushes, and Mary is teaching. She has to do something physical, something distracting, something with her hands.

Her gloved fingers pick apart, tear away, pull like a magician with never-ending scarves, feet and feet and fathoms.

She embalms.

She thinks.

She doesn’t think.

She fathoms.

Formaldehyde and formalities.

A perfect mortician.

xxx

She figures she’ll dream, keeps waiting for it, dreading it.

Maybe it’s not so momentous as all that.

xxx

The Friday dinner is silent.

Until it’s not.

“It’s an open secret,” Mary says around a mouthful of broccoli, “how delicious these meals can be.”

They all gape at one another.

Mary is hungry, ravenous, shameless.

Hilda giggles.

Zelda frowns.

Sabrina and Ambrose grimace.

Mary is still herself, still half smiling.

They all look and don’t look.

“In fact, I’m a little offended I hadn’t been invited sooner,” Mary says, takes a sip of wine. “All the other teachers have a lot to say about your cooking, Miss Spellman.” She’s looking at Hilda, daring her to give them away with a misplaced blush.

“This contrived flattery will get you nowhere,” Zelda says. “We’ve invited exactly two other teachers over, and both of them are now deceased.” Sabrina almost spits out her water, eyes wide. Hilda says quickly,

“No causation there. Simply an unfortunate correlation. May Mr. Detweiller and Mrs. Avery Rest In Peace.” Ambrose laughs. Zelda and Sabrina glare at him. Mary’s still looking at Hilda, eyebrows arched. But she turns abruptly to Zelda,

“What kind of flattery am I permitted, then?” Zelda must take it for flirtation and softens a tad, says,

“An honest compliment goes a long way.” Mary drags her eyes up and down Zelda, turns back to face Hilda.

“The meal is perfection, and if I might add, I find your dress very becoming, Miss Spellman.”

“Thank you, Miss Wardwell,” Hilda says. She doesn’t dare look at Zelda for her reaction, but she hears it anyway. Hears the scrape of her chair as she says in a pinched voice,

“I’ll be in the parlor. I could use a nightcap.”

“Very good dinner, Auntie,” Ambrose says. “But I’ve got—”

Even as Sabrina is saying,

“Good seeing you, Miss Wardwell, but I have to—”

Mary grins, and Hilda says,

“Take the dishes to the kitchen, yeah?”

Ambrose and Sabrina look at each other and then start gathering china. Mary and Hilda look at each other and then start toward the parlor.

xxx

Zelda’s smoking a cigarette, drinking scotch, and the record player hisses and pops with just enough of a whisper that Hilda can discern it’s Rosanne Cash.

Zelda turns from her place standing at the mantle and hisses, very low,

“I don’t trust you, Wardwell. I don’t trust you with my niece, and I sure as heaven don’t trust you with my sister.”

Zelda’s eyes blaze, and Hilda is struck immobile looking at them. Zelda knows. She’s pieced it together seeing their interactions. And she’s so angry. The iron fire poker is so close to her left thigh. Would Mary defend Hilda against it? 

Hilda finally looks at Mary, who is smiling and pouring herself a drink, looking completely unbothered.

“You have every right and responsibility not to trust me, Miss Spellman,” Mary says. “I’ve lied to you more than I’ve told the truth. I’ve undermined you and circumvented you at every turn.” She takes a drink, and the way her mouth and throat move as she does so makes Hilda want to fuck her right there against the bar. “And I’m very powerful in the dark arts. There’s no reason you should trust me. But, to my credit, I didn’t ask you, and besides, your interests are really of very little concern to me.” 

Hilda can’t stop herself from laughing at that. Zelda’s eyes flit to her instead, and there’s a warning there. She stops laughing. Two deaths in a week might be too much for her system.

Zelda’s fiery eyes are back on Mary as she says,

“I can respect that. As long as you stay out of my home.”

“But it’s not just your home, is it, dear?” Mary says.

Zelda turns to Hilda again, says,

“Tell her she’s not welcome here.”

“I rather enjoy Miss Wardwell’s company,” Hilda says.

Zelda slams her drink onto the mantle, throws her cigarette into the fire, stalks toward Hilda. Mary stiffens, watches intently, but does not intervene. Zelda bunches the collar of Hilda’s dress in a clenched fist, places her other hand surprisingly gently on Hilda’s shoulder, whispers,

“This is where you’ve been, then? Really? With this horrible woman?”

Her eyes are no longer angry but still ablaze, pleading, attempting to fathom.

“I—” Hilda looks at her eyes, her quivering lips, the fist at her clavicle. “I don’t think this is the appropriate time for this conversation.” Zelda retreats, takes up her drink, still staring into Hilda.

“Well,” Mary says. She downs her drink and sets the empty glass on the desk. “What a fun evening, ladies. We should do this again sometime.” Both sisters roll their eyes. “Walk me to my car?” Mary says to Hilda.

“Don’t wait up,” Hilda says over her shoulder, already leading Mary by her arm toward the door.

xxx

They kiss at the driver’s side door and then fumble to the door behind, fall into the backseat.

Hilda is on top of Mary, whispering,

“Did you gather the information you needed?”

“Yes,” Mary says, drawing Hilda closer.

xxx

“You smell like her. I should’ve figured it out sooner.”

Zelda is sitting at the kitchen table. It’s dark. No lamps, no candles, no cigarettes.

“I told you not to wait up,” Hilda says.

“I’ll do whatever I please,” Zelda says.

“I can’t imagine this being pleasing to you.”

“What can you imagine being pleasing to me?” Zelda says, so quiet in the dark.

“Oh Zelds. I don’t even know.”

“I think you do know.”

There is a pause, and it’s so dark in the kitchen.

“I need a bath,” Hilda says finally.

“I know,” Zelda says.

xxx

Hilda sinks into the hot water, and Zelda watches, yearning.


	22. Chapter 22

Hilda’s working a shift at the diner. She’d convinced Cee that the wig is too itchy and she might have to form a union if she’s forced to wear it further. He had laughed, and proposed a new dress code: vintage horror related or adjacent. He had scoffed but ultimately capitulated when Hilda had appeared in a turtleneck and flannel “like that woman, what’s her name, in that movie with the axe and redrum and the typewriter and all that.” He had laughed so hard she had been reminded why she’d kissed him. 

It’s almost closing time. The door jingles, and Mary walks in, and she remembers why she hadn’t done any more than kiss him.

Mary slides into a booth and crooks a finger. Hilda typically doesn’t waitress, but she responds anyway.

“What’s your pleasure?” Hilda says, a little naughty. But Mary has her serious face on.

“I was going to wait and tell you tonight...but thought the message might get muddled that way. Dreams are funny that way.”

“Oh. Not a sexy message, then, I suppose?” Hilda says sotto voce. Mary shakes her head, licks her tongue over her top teeth.

“Parts of it are sexier than others. If you look at it a certain way.” There’s a glint of danger in her eyes. Hilda doesn’t know what to make of it, but she says anyway,

“I’m off in fifteen.”

“I’ll take a chocolate malt while I wait.”

xxx

They leave Hilda’s car on the street and don’t start talking until they’re a few minutes away, Mary driving them lazily around the lake, slow wide swaths the way she’d drunk that milkshake, the way one drives a convertible on a sunny Sunday afternoon looking at real estate with someone you cherish. Zelda used to drive a convertible just like that. Hilda shakes herself out of it, says,

“So?”

“I lead a rather busy life, Miss Spellman. A lot of facets. A lot of obligations. I ought not assign so many research papers. It’s quite a burden to be a teacher in a mortal public school.”

Hilda wishes she had a prop, a distraction, for this. There’s no booze, no cigarette, not even a receipt in the ash tray she could crumple and uncrumple. She fingers the hem of her flannel, but it’s unsatisfying, nothing yielding under her fingers, nothing burning in her throat.

“But I’ve chosen this life. I’ll leave fate to the Greek heroes and the Calvinists. I chose to come here and do the things I’ve done and continue to do the things I do and also maintain a teaching position at Baxter High. So I shouldn’t be so indignant about having to grade the papers I chose to assign in the first place.” 

She takes a turn off the main road onto a gravel one, heavily wooded and so dark, and Hilda feels just an ounce of real fear. It’s usually just unease or distrust or suspicion, but now, the hairs at the back of her neck prick. Mary is still driving so slowly, leisurely. Hilda almost expects her to open the moon roof, but it’s too cold for that, and she’s going slow because she’s going slow, not because they’re mutually going slow and enjoying the slowness.

“I had chosen this morning. I had chosen to carve out a time for myself to enjoy my fireplace and a little Malbec and maybe a meal as I sifted through near-idiotic ramblings of the teenage brain and then reward myself by slipping into your unconscious mind and knowing you, seeing your secret thoughts and secret hauntings, and ravishing you until you forgot your pain for a moment.”

The gravel has narrowed, takes a sharp curve, and opens again at the main road. Hilda’s hackles relax a touch as Mary’s car tires roll smoothly onto the pavement again.

“But as you’ve probably concluded, that was not to be. I arrived to a familiar car in my driveway. And my heart stuttered that perhaps you’d shirked your sundry duties and were waiting for me, perhaps even in lacy lingerie.” Hilda gasps at that. It’s almost a giggle but not. This monologue has been so enlightening to her in so many ways, but this is the revelation that elicits a semi-vocal response. Oh how she wishes for a receipt to tear. It’s too tense in the car, or she’d rummage in the glove box for a straw to chew. She unbuttons and buttons again her bottom button, just to keep her hands busy.

“‘Miss Spellman,’ I said as I walked in my unlocked door, already wet thinking of you. But of course you also know, you weren’t there. ‘I am a Miss Spellman but not the Miss Spellman you expected,’ your sister’s voice said. She didn’t even turn to face me, just let her cigarette smoke rise and curl.”

They’re driving down by the water now. It’s half-frozen, and the water beneath the ice undulates feebly. There’s a tableau of waves on top, white peaks a snapshot of what they had once been and will be again when it’s the right temperature, the right conditions.

“And she reprimanded you, and you fucked,” Hilda says. She knows how this goes. Anything that is hers is ultimately Zelda’s.

“No,” Mary says. “She warned me, and she threatened me, and she begged me, and I threw her out.”

The car winds away from the water, back through the woods. Hilda sees a deer that isn’t exactly a deer, a opossum that isn’t exactly a opossum. She looks then at Mary’s sharp profile and sees a woman who isn’t exactly a woman.

“What did she beg about?” Hilda says.

“If you don’t know already—” Mary starts. But then she looks over at Hilda in the passenger seat, and her expression changes slightly. “She begged me to stop defiling you.”

Hilda laughs and snorts and laughs.

“She would, wouldn’t she?” Hilda says. “She’s all tied up with that bullshit when the real question is what kind of demon you are.” Hilda laughs again. 

Mary laughs, too.

xxx

“This is where the teenagers park and neck, isn’t it?” Hilda says.

The car’s in a clearing overlooking the lake.

“I do glean some benefits as a high school teacher,” Mary says.

xxx

Mary’s hot, hot mouth is at her clit, all fire and fathoms and dreams.

She’s half dressed in the backseat of an Oldsmobile, and she can’t be bothered to take umbrage at the facts of it.

It’s the feel of it. The paroxysm of it.

Her hands in Mary’s hair, her ass pushing down into the ancient leather that smells like a dog treat, dexterous fingers in her cunt, dexterous fingers on her left tit. She doesn’t care that she’s fucking like a teenager. She deserves it, and she likes it.

xxx

Hilda’s at her own car door.

“And still you don’t want to tell me who you truly are.”

Mary’s body is hot as it pins her.

“I gathered a lot of information. But I’m not sure yet.”

“Ok. Fine. Whatever,” Hilda says. But it’s not ok, fine, or even whatever. 

But it is what it is.

Fathoms and cheating songs.


	23. Chapter 23

The house is empty and silent and dark when Hilda returns. Maybe there’s a dance or something she hadn’t been invited to. 

She relishes it.

The long underwear have finally been delivered, and she wants to eat terrible bar food and drink beer in them, so she does. She fries pickles and cauliflower, hardboils a few eggs, rummages in the pantry for pretzels and peanuts, flops onto the sofa with a Coors Light. She laughs thinking of a werewolf she knew once who drank the Silver Bullet exclusively. And then even as she’s drinking, her thinking sobers.

She’s surfeited herself in so many ways lately, and she doesn’t know if she feels free or shackled by it. She sits up suddenly, remembering something else. 

She’s at the record player. She’s got to hear that song again, listen to what Zelda had wanted her to hear. She finds the groove to start the track, listens, blinks:

“While I’m putting on my makeup, I’m putting on the one who really loves me.”

Barbara Mandrell’s so good at cheating songs.

Hilda supposes Zelda’s good at playing jealous husband. 

If only she’d known they’d been married.

She drinks another beer.

A fit of acute rage. 

She lets the broken vinyl pieces fall where they may and knows she will have to clean that up later but not now.

She’s so cozy and calm as she brushes her teeth, falls into bed.

xxx

She dreams finally.

But Mary isn’t there.

And neither is World War Two.

It’s all fathoms and cheating songs.

xxx

It was after a ritual.

It wasn’t Hilda’s own dark baptism. It wasn’t Zelda’s either. Or Sabrina’s.

But the dark was there and the ritual was there and the woods were there.

Masked faces, adrenaline, lust.

Hilda was running through trees and brush, panting but not tired. She never tired in dreams.

She tripped over a root and fell.

She fell and fell.

Fell for so long she forgot how to not fall.

And when she landed it was with a softness she’d never known. She’d known earth and dirt, but this earth and dirt was sweet and billowing, and she sunk into it, relieved, but also she knew she should be running still.

A hard fast breath above her.

“Have I caught you?” Zelda’s voice said.

“It’s easy to catch an animal that’s already caged,” Hilda said.

“Don’t blame me, my love. You’ve caged yourself.”

Hilda tried to protest, but it came out a feral wail.

xxx

Hilda wakes with a start as she’s throwing off her quilt. She’s sweating and has already in slumber wrenched off the bottoms of the long underwear and is still feeling the urge to run.

But she’s in her own bed in her own room.

Her heart beats and beats. Fast feral fathoms.

She doesn’t know why her beating heart has taken her to Zelda’s room. Until she does.

The door opens. Maybe she has opened it. Maybe it has opened itself.

Zelda is asleep and then awake. So awake.

“You say a lot of things and mean a lot of things,” Hilda finds herself saying.

“It’s true, though,” Zelda says. “I am and always have been—”

“Oh shush. You’d never have thought to say that if I hadn’t been fucking someone else.”

The lighting is indeterminate, low, vague, but still Hilda can see Zelda’s blush.

“Don’t torture me, sister,” Zelda says. She closes her eyes tight, eeks out, “I know you don’t love me as I love you. But now that you love someone else, it’s too much for me to bear.”

Hilda remembers all the cheating songs, pulsates with them, fathoms them.

Maybe she does love Mary. Maybe she doesn’t. Either way, it’s a cheating song.

“Oh shush,” Hilda says. “I love everyone and no one. You know me, Zelds.”

“I do. And I don’t,” Zelda says. She opens her eyes and bores into Hilda. “But I’d like to.”

Hilda looks down at her naked thighs and then back up to Zelda’s naked eyes, glistening in the naked moonlight.

“Do you really?” Hilda says.

“I have proof,” Zelda says as she pulls back her duvet, bunches up her nightgown around her hips.

Hilda can see and smell, but,

“But that could be for anybody. Because of anything.”

“It isn’t.” Zelda pauses, pierces. “I’m not.”

They look at each other.

It’s so dark, with so many fathoms between them.

But Hilda takes a step across the threshold.

“I wish you would’ve told me sooner,” Hilda says.

“I did,” Zelda says. “But very badly.”

xxx

Hilda has always wanted this and not wanted this.

Her wants have never been analyzed by anyone, especially not by herself.

She has existed thus far as some entity that provides comfort to others. But finally now she is something different. She is her own entity, and she’s mad and hungry.

Everyone seems to like it as much as they’re wary of it.

Hilda doesn’t care. She satisfies herself now, comforts herself now. She fathoms herself, and the fathoms within her sing and sway.

xxx

Hilda moves back into her old room, keeps working at the diner, keeps fucking Mary Wardwell, keeps fucking Zelda. 

It’s cozy. Like the long underwear.

Until it isn’t.


	24. Chapter 24

Hilda hasn’t dreamt in what feels like ages.

Dreams can mean so much.

Not dreams can mean so much.

Her life is cozy.

But no. Not that.

Her life is warm, threatening to boil over.

She keeps the burner on medium, but certain things have lower boiling points, pop and fizzle differently.

She doesn’t have the right oil for the pan.

She doesn’t have the right pan for the heat.

Or maybe it’s different oils for different pans and different heats.

And her clutch is stuck.

But still the radio works. And it’s all cheating songs.

xxx

Zelda is out until all hours.

Hilda ought not think of it. She’s been out all hours plenty recently.

But Hilda’s never come back with lash marks. A hickey or two, maybe, but never lashes.

Hilda tends the wounds, silent and suspicious.

“Yes, it hurts. But not as much as—” Zelda chokes out.

“Don’t. Just let me help you,” Hilda says.

Zelda flinches away.

“Help me?! Get fucked, Hildegard!”

They sit opposite each other on separate beds, looking at each other, fathoming each other.

xxx

“We’re not a thing,” Mary says. Her breath is ragged still. “You said so yourself.” Hilda sidles up next to her. They’re both naked.

“I know,” Hilda says, nuzzling Mary’s ear. “But maybe it’d be easier if we were.”

Mary’s eyes are glistening and weird when they fix on Hilda.

“Easier is not always better,” Mary says.

“Not always. But sometimes,” Hilda says.

xxx

They’re again in the clearing where the teenagers park and neck.

“I’m the kind of demon that you want,” Mary says.

“I want a lot of different things,” Hilda says.

They fuck anyway. They fathom anyway.

xxx

Hilda wants a lot of things. She doesn’t know how to say them. 

Hilda suspects a lot of things. She doesn’t know how to say them.

Fathoms, cheating songs, psychological arguments. Fuck Freud and all his followers.

Where is Amelia Earhart anyway?

xxx

They’re not a thing.

xxx

Hilda is suspicious of Mary Wardwell, the woman who is not a woman.

Hilda is suspicious of Zelda, the sister who is not a sister.

Hilda is suspicious of herself who is not herself.

Hilda is suspicious.


	25. Chapter 25

Perhaps a year ago or a century ago if Hilda had started having sex with Zelda and then Zelda had abruptly put a stop to it without any kind of discussion or even murder, she would’ve been more hurt.

But they’ve both stopped listening to country-western music lately.

The last time had been some maudlin Dwight Yoakam—as if there is any other kind of Dwight Yoakam—as they had pretended to play chess. Not two pawns had gotten moved and not one song had gotten sung before Zelda had dropped to her knees in front of Hilda.

It had been a furious sort of fucking, a coupling that had left throw pillows torn and flesh bleeding.

Zelda had stood up directly afterward and said,

“We’re done.”

And then she had left.

Hilda had drunk a cup of tea and had mended the pillows. She hadn’t dared try the door of their room and had found, as she had suspected, her things neatly piled in a corner of the spare room. 

She had slept soundly and right away. But of course, she’d slipped a little valerian root into her tea.

xxx

But she sits up now. A 3am a week later.

Zelda has been tense and silent.

Hilda hasn’t seen Mary.

It’s just her in the dark, alone with herself, fathoming herself.

What does she want, and what does she not want?

She guesses she’s cycling through all the regular things.

She’d written poetry. She’d tried opium. She’d drunk her fair share. She’d experimented with exercise videos and juice cleanses and bullet journaling and mindfulness.

And now was her sex phase.

She doesn’t know what an equilibrium is supposed to look like.

She knows apotheosis. The absolute high. But also the absolute low.

But she doesn’t know what to do with either.

The closest she’d come to an understanding had been her years as an ambulance driver.

And ain’t that a kick in the head

Her feelings and thoughts swirl, congeal. Sex is ok, but it’s just biology. Sex is ok, but it’s just guilt. Sex is ok, but it’s so good and perfect and scratching every itch but the one unscratched.

xxx

What would Freud say?

We all know and try to not know.

What would Chuck Yeager say?

Probably just yeehaw.

What would Amelia Earhart say?

Where is that blasted woman anyway?

xxx

Hilda’s in an anonymous bed at a mortal hotel.

The starched and anonymous linens cover her and Mary.

“I’m not sure I want to do this anymore,” Hilda says.

Mary is suddenly standing at the foot of the bed, looking her over.

“I’m not sure we have a choice at this point,” Mary says.

They fuck anyway. It’s delicious and terrible. And so many fathoms besides.

xxx

It’s 1am and so many fathoms besides.

xxx

It’s 2am and so many fathoms besides.

xxx

It’s 3am.

She hears from down the hall.

Fathoms.

Cheating songs she hadn’t fathomed.


	26. Chapter 26

Hilda goes on with her life.

She thinks and doesn’t think.

Fathoms and doesn’t fathom.

It’s all a bleak garden in winter, pruning and hoping. Deadheading for later, flexing biceps for now.

A lot of muscle and a lot of pain.

A lot of this and a lot of that.

Paroxysm. Pretty lies.

xxx

She knows by now Mary’s lies are only half lies.

Half truths.

Obfuscation and illusion.

What should be rather than what is.

What could be rather than what ought to be.

She sucks a bottom lip, fathoms a particularly ridiculous fathom. Grinds her hips. Feels and knows.

xxx

“You don’t want to—” Hilda says.

“Absolutely not,” Mary says. “I want what I want, and you want what you want.”

“But what if—”

“That’s fake,” Mary says.

xxx

All might be fake.

All might be real.

All might be country-western songs.

xxx

Hilda watches the waffle machine. It should do what it does on its own, but she watches anyway.

Zelda reads her newspaper anyway.

The lights light the way they light when the waffle is done, and Hilda plates it, starts another.

“You’re staring,” Zelda says, still looking at her newspaper.

“You wish,” Hilda says.

Zelda’s eyes appear from behind the newspaper:

“I don’t wish. I know.”

Hilda pulls up her skirt, sets herself on a kitchen counter:

“Yes. But you also know.”

Zelda stalks toward her.

They’re both all instinct, all lust.

But they both wish something else.

Hilda wishes for a thing; Zelda wishes for a forever. They both fathom and touch anyway.

Zelda’s fingers are inside Hilda, fathoming.

Hilda’s moans are inside Zelda, fathoming.

xxx

“Thank you,” Hilda says.

“For what?” Mary says.

They’re naked and still half writhing against each other.

“For being what and who you are.”

Mary tenses above her.

“Oh?” Mary says.

“Yes,” Hilda sighs. “You may lie, but you never pretend.”

“Oh,” Mary says.

“We’re not a thing,” Hilda says. “But we might as well be.”

“We might as well be,” Mary says. She readjusts herself against Hilda. “And perhaps we are.”

They look at each other. They fathom each other. They cuddle into each other.

“I don’t care who you are,” Hilda says. “I only care who you are to me.”

“I’m the demon you want. The demon in your dreams.”

“The woman in my dreams.”

Their eyes lock.

“The woman in your dreams who is not a woman,” Mary says.


	27. Chapter 27

Mary’s late for their date. 

No. 

It’s not a date because they’re not a thing.

Mary’s often tardy but never late for their rendezvous. Liaisons. Appointments. Sessions.

She almost always arrives after Hilda, but she’s not late.

But now.

But now Hilda is alone at the mortal hotel bar, getting drunk on mojitos, waiting.

And Mary is actually late. It’s beyond fashionable and beyond Mary’s regular Mary teasing. 

Hilda dances with a man, and it’s awful and only to fill the time.

And Mary’s late.

When Mary finally arrives, there’s a sigh, a revelation, a fathom.

Their eyes meet, and Hilda’s are bleary and unfocused, but she still sees.

Mary places herself between the man and Hilda, says into her ear,

“Sorry. I had some business to take care of.”

“Bollocks,” Hilda says. “You don’t care about business or me.” But she arches into Mary’s touch anyway, dances with her anyway.

Mary sighs heavily.

“You want to answer my questions,” Hilda whispers.

“You don’t want to ask them,” Mary whispers.

xxx

“You said we were done,” Hilda says against Zelda’s mouth.

They’re in the arboretum, and Zelda’s pressing her against the glass—anxious, angry hands pulling at her skirt.

“A woman has the prerogative to change her mind,” Zelda says, her mouth descending again.

But Hilda doesn’t let her, says,

“Which woman? Which prerogative?”

Zelda pushes her harder, bruises her, looks at her finally with a piercing, blazing, fathoming look. And she removes herself swiftly.

“If you don’t know already, I’m not going to tell you,” Zelda says.

“That’s fake,” Hilda says, panting, holding herself up against the large pane.

“Maybe it is. But maybe it’s not,” Zelda says as she leaves.

xxx

Hilda doesn’t dream.

Except when she does.

But she doesn’t dream now.

And she doesn’t want to.

But she does want to.

She puts on a Dolly Parton record.


	28. Chapter 28

It’s all an unfocused thing, as if only one contact lens is in—focusing, unfocusing, working too hard to see.

It’s grainy and cloudy and pixelated and wonky. 

Headache inducing.

And has been going on for so long.

It hasn’t been so long, but it feels long, and it feels fuzzy and interminable.

The phone rings.

Zelda looks at Hilda over her newspaper, and Hilda goes to it.

“Spellman Mortuary,” Hilda says.

“Oh! Hi!” The line is silent and buzzing for a second, and the voice continues, “It’s Esther! From the Chamber of Commerce!”

“Oh. Hello,” Hilda says.

“Hilda. It’s so good to hear your voice. You’ve missed the last couple meetings. I’m just calling to check in, see if there’s anything wrong, see if there’s anything I can do.”

Chamber of Commerce meetings are on Tuesday afternoons. The last couple Tuesday afternoons she’d been fucking Mary Wardwell. Hilda hadn’t put those pieces together until just now.

“Oh no,” Hilda says. “Just caught up. Thank you for your concern. I’ll be there Tuesday.”

xxx

The pieces fall where they may, are stitched in intermittently, with varying degrees of understanding.

It’s the way of quilts—scraps here and there, joined together in a haphazard tapestry that tells an entire story rather than the smaller story of the distinct pieces.

Hilda’s in the basement of the Immaculate Heart of Mary Catholic Church, failing to focus on her needle and thread, as the leader of her quilting group says,

“Hilda?”

She raises her eyes from her inefficient fumblings.

“Yes?” Hilda says.

“I don’t want to overstep. But you’ve seemed distracted lately.”

Quilting group is Thursday. Zelda usually wants to fuck on Wednesdays. And Mary likes a Friday.

“I’m sure I have,” Hilda says.

xxx

It’s all wobbly. It’s all what it is and isn’t. It’s all words and phrases and fathoms.

It’s all what it’s not, and Hilda thinks and doesn’t think, fathoms and doesn’t fathom.

There are people who care about her. There are people who care about themselves.

She owes herself to so many people.

She owes herself to herself.

xxx

The phone rings.

She answers and gives an answer.

xxx

The phone doesn’t ring, and still her answer is there.

Amelia Earhart had flown and disappeared.

Why shouldn’t she do the same?


	29. Chapter 29

It’s well past the witching hour, and Hilda’s pacing in the back garden, half a pint into a black glass bottle of cheap sloe gin. She’s got a trowel in her other hand, but she’d given up the pretense of gardening twenty minutes ago. The fresh air’s making her more lucid, which is only helping to get her more riled up. 

Zelda’s watching her from their bedroom window, Ambrose is watching her from his bedroom window, and Sabrina’s watching from the den, where she’s trying to finish a paper she should’ve written anytime before three hours until it’s due. They’re all trying to will each other into going to see what’s wrong.

Ambrose finally decides it’s his turn. He’s seen the look on Hilda’s face, can’t bear to watch her start talking to herself.

“Sloe gin’s an interesting choice for the evening,” he says by way of salutation.

“Used to drink quite a lot of it. During the war. Used to make quite a lot of it. Earned some extra dough that way.” She laughs and tosses the trowel into an overgrown but mostly dead potted mint. She also tosses back another drink, says, “Care for some?”

“No, thank you. I uh. Is something bothering you, Auntie?”

She laughs again, zips her coat the rest of the way.

“Yes, love. Thanks for noticing.”

“Oh, I don’t deserve any praise for that. You’re as obvious as a Pentecostal in the front row at the Church of Night.” They look at each other. She’s a little angry then. Angry that she’s been so obvious. Angry that she hasn’t been obvious enough. Angry that she hasn’t let herself talk to anyone and that she still isn’t.

“Yes, well, thanks for the concern.” She’s about to tell him to go to bed, but then he’s already here, all ready to let her talk. “It seems I’ve gotten myself into a pickle.”

Something flashes across his face, and she knows he’s wondering what kind, suspecting it will have something to do with bees or knitting or even blowing money on something. She says,

“Did you wonder why Miss Wardwell came to dinner a while back?”

“Not particularly. You love having guests for dinner.”

“I do, don’t I?” She takes another drink, considers a different tactic to get him to say it so she doesn’t have to. “Did you wonder why Zelda got so mad?”

“Not particularly. She hates having guests for dinner.”

“She does, doesn’t she?” He’s staring at her, shivering, pulling his silk robe closer around himself. There’s no easy way. She blurts: “I’m sleeping with her.”

“Aunt Zelda?!” he says, no longer shivering, robe falling open as his hands go up to cover his face.

“What?! No! Actually yes her, too, but it started out—” He takes the bottle, chugs a good three pulls.

“We’re gonna need more booze for this.”

She grabs his hand, drags him into the greenhouse. She rummages in a trunk for another bottle, and they both sit in wicker chairs next to each other, both carefully looking out the window instead of at each other.

She gives him as solid and linear a summary as she is able, and they both drink and sigh. He swallows again, and the liqueur is so sweet. Too sweet.

“Is this genuine Hilda the Riveter homemade vintage 1944?”

“Could be. But I went through another phase of it in the early ‘80s. And it’s dark in here, so.”

They do look at each other now.

“Well? Do you hate me?” Hilda says.

“Of course not. Do you hate you?”

“Of course I do.” He pulls a hand over his face, says,

“This isn’t making you happy.”

“Of course not.”

“But you don’t know how to tell either of them without getting murdered.”

“On the nosey.”

They both sigh again, and he takes her hand, runs his thumb over the back of it, says,

“Maybe we should get some sleep. Think about it tomorrow.”

“Unless you want to help me knock over a liquor store and skip town,” Hilda laughs.

“If only I were able.”

xxx

She doesn’t think about it the next morning. She goes through her regular Friday routine.

Breakfast, a quick touch up to the house, a business meeting with a grieving widower, a quickie with Zelda in the office, a shift at the diner, a weird but overall pleasant half-sleepover with Mary.

It’s when she’s sneaking back home in the middle of the night that she realizes how tired she is.

She sits heavily in her father’s favorite leather chair in the den. She summons up a little Chet Baker for the record player. Bebop is just the crazy thing she needs to help her shuffle through her thoughts.

She’s been aware that she’s confused and tense and anxious and increasingly angry. But unholy shit is she tired.

She shouldn’t be afraid to sleep. She should be fairly certain she’s bought her uninterrupted sleep a few times over by now. 

She likes Mary. Mary makes her laugh. Lets her ramble. Takes her on drives. The last time they’d gone to the hotel, they’d sneaked into the closed pool and skinny dipped. Mary indulges her in so many ways. But she doesn’t quite trust Mary. The demon thing is concerning. And she still hasn’t put together what she’s playing at exactly. What she’s doing in this town, why she’s mentoring her niece, why she’d chosen Hilda as paramour, why she continues to be alternately open and cagey, tender and strange. It’s all bizarre to Hilda.

And exhausting.

And Zelda. Hell’s Seventh Circle. Zelda.

At least she would lay good odds that Mary likes her, enjoys her. She’d venture to lay decent odds Mary wants her pretty much for the regular reasons people want each other—simple attraction and maybe personal gain, but she hasn’t worked that one out yet; again, the disconcerting things are disconcerting. But still. It feels like a regular affair to her. Whatever that means.

She wouldn’t know where to put her money for Zelda.

She’d tried not to think about that too much. Let it happen, let it burn itself out, let it die. Let Zelda get over the jealousy and possessiveness, slide back into their regular relationship of comfortable companionship with intermittent spikes of animosity for flavor. 

But as she’s sitting here, sinking into the chair, staring at the black ceiling, running her fingernails softly over the worn arms, she knows that’s not an option, and she shouldn’t have let herself think it in the first place.

That’s not how jealousy and possessiveness work, and even if it were, it’s not healthy and not a real plan.

And not honest, anyway. 

She bites at the inside of her cheek.

She’s being honest with herself now. Zelda has always looked at her, and she’s always looked at Zelda. There’s always been a lot wrapped up in it, and now that there had been an inciting incident—

Why had this thing-not-thing with Mary been the inciting incident anyway?

Anger flushes her throat and chest, and she removes her coat, throws it onto the desk. She’d had a few boyfriends and girlfriends here and there. She’d kissed nearly everyone she knew in Paris in the ‘20s. And then fucked a few of them in Berlin five years later.

But everyone had been doing that then. She hadn’t been doing that now. And not over and over again with the same person, sneaking out at night, lying, darting around with unhealed hickies, avoiding family time. Until she had been. And that probably had felt enough to Zelda like moving on and starting a new, separate life that Zelda had not been able to process her emotions in any reasonable way. Neither of them could talk, and neither of them could listen. But they had loved each other too much to let that stand in their way, so they fucked instead. Lucifer’s lightning! Of course!

Everyone’s a blame shifter in some regard and to some degree. Hilda had never thought of this as a particular vice of hers, has usually taken responsibility.

But this whole time she’s been blaming Mary and blaming Zelda. Pretending a lot of things, projecting a lot of feelings.

Maybe that’s why she’s unhappy with this situation.

She likes fucking both of them. She suspects they both like fucking her.

But she needs a blessed rest.

Cheating songs usually end badly.

But at least they end.

xxx

Hilda’s arbitrarily paired up with just the most beautiful blond man for couples tennis. 

“You didn’t come with someone?” she says.

“No,” he blushes. “Just divorced. But still wanted to play. You?”

“I’m on vacation. Alone.”

They’re shaking hands, both about to introduce themselves, when the tennis pro brings the phone out to her, says she has a call. She nods and waves an apology to the man, steps off court.

“Hello?” she says.

“Zelda is fit to be tied.” It’s Ambrose’s panicked, hushed voice.

“She likes that sort of thing.” A pause.

“Gross. I don’t want to know. I’m worried our house will be burnt to the ground before you can catch a flight back.”

“I guess she got my note,” Hilda says.

It had been a simple, “Gotta get away for a few days.” With the name and number for her hotel in Miami. She’d told Mary in person, and in fact, Mary had driven her to the airport, kissed her almost sweetly as she had handed her her suitcase from the trunk.

“Yes, we all got your note. She thinks you went with—what did she call her—‘that tits-out-halfbit-pretentious-salacious cunt.’”

“Will you write that one down for me? Mary will like that,” Hilda says.

“So you’re not—what did she say about it—‘cavorting around nude on horseback on the beach, feeding each other overripe fruit and laughing at us all?’” He doesn’t keep the snicker out of his voice this time.

“Absolutely not,” Hilda laughs. “I’m about to play tennis. And I might go to bed with this divorced guy I just met if he doesn’t make me lose this doubles match.”

“Um what?”

“You heard me. Can’t put the cork back in the champagne, I’m afraid. Anything else?”

“Um no. But to be clear, you are definitely not on some—what did she call it—‘insane impulsive bang-around-the-world with a horny teenager’s misinformed and disgusting idea of what a spinster school teacher is?’”

“She’ll like that one too. We ought to keep a journal of Zelds’s best zingers.”

“Please answer me truthfully,” he says.

“I am alone. I needed some time away from those two. Would’ve taken you with me if I could’ve, though. And Sabrina, but she said she didn’t want to get in the middle of anything.” There’s some rustling in the background, and Ambrose’s voice is even quieter:

“Have fun, be safe, love you.” And the line is dead.

The man makes her lose the match.

She goes swimming in the ocean instead of having any more to do with him.

She eats a lot of Cuban food.

She sleeps like a baby.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Is this chapter an excuse to manufacture witch-specific euphemistic profanities? Is this chapter a direct response to the comments I’ve been getting lately? Is this chapter an exercise in self-indulgence? One might be tempted to answer yes to all, and one might be right.


	30. Chapter 30

It’s the night before Hilda will fly home the next morning.

Her things are neatly packed.

She has bought thoughtful souvenirs for everyone.

She’d been very drunk on Run Runners at a club with a lot of neon lights and salty, humid air on the open patio, and she had danced with everyone who had asked, kissed a few of them.

And now she’s content and dead asleep in her hotel room.

Until that dead sleep betrays her.

xxx

It was the club in Miami except it wasn’t. It was the hotel bar in Greendale except it wasn’t. It was a seedy strip joint in Berlin 1933 except it wasn’t. It was a tavern in Edinburghshire 1882 except it wasn’t.

It was all these things and all not these things, all fathoms, all cheating songs. Dream regular.

Hilda sat in a dark booth, sipping at something indeterminate. A combination, accumulation, a metaphor without the steel guitar.

And somebody somewhere was playing something on an accordion. She didn’t want to like it, but she did anyway.

And Zelda approached. She was dressed as she had dressed in the ‘60s, all light-colored lipstick and tight skirts and political pins.

They looked at each other.

And then Zelda slid into the booth.

“I didn’t expect you,” Hilda said.

“Not this way, anyway,” Zelda said.

“Right, right.”

“What did you expect?” Zelda said.

“Ghosts and pain. Death. Lies,” Hilda said without thinking. Dream Hilda was very bold. Real Hilda looking in grimaced.

“Hmm,” Zelda said, pursing her light pink lips. “You didn’t expect something different? Something beautiful?”

“Why would I?” Hilda said.

The ‘60s image of Zelda dissolved, resolved into a current representation. And her face was so mad.

“Bless it, Hildegard!”

Dream Hilda and Real Hilda coalesced, slid against each other, fathomed each other and their surroundings.

“What are you doing here?” Hilda said.

“What are you doing here?” Zelda shouted back. It was real Zelda, and real Hilda was real mad about it.

“If you weren’t so impatient and ridiculous—” Hilda started. But Zelda was already cutting her off:

“If I didn’t miss you so much—

They stared at each other.

“I’ll be back tomorrow. You’ve wasted this magic,” Hilda said.

“Nothing’s a waste when it comes to you,” Zelda said.

The words ring in Hilda’s ears as she shoots up awake before her alarm.

xxx

Mary kisses her gently at the airport. She doesn’t ask anything, takes her luggage, kisses her again, not so gently.

So it’s this again, is it?

She’d had a whole vacation and yet here are these fathoms already?!

But then.

Of course Mary expects Mary things, and of course she expects the same if she’s being honest, but she’s resolved to be honest.

“I like you, Mary, and we are a thing whether we like it or not. I’m going to fuck you tonight, but in future, I will do so only on Friday evenings. And Tuesday afternoons, but I will finish us both off before Chamber of Commerce meetings.”

Mary considers and then says,

“I’m amenable.”

xxx

She’s rested but not ready.

Zelda is waiting for her in the kitchen.

“I’ve missed you,” Zelda says too candidly for comfort.

“You’ve missed parts of me, certainly,” Hilda says. She doesn’t mention the present stowed in her luggage.

“I’ve missed all of you. You very well know I’m very good at tennis.”

“We could’ve won a lot of matches,” Hilda says.

“We could have a lot of things.”

And Zelda’s words reverberate.

Hilda fathoms.


	31. Chapter 31

Hilda has set boundaries.

Mary respects them.

Hilda doesn’t know why Mary—whatever higher demon she might be—would be a creature who should be satisfied with stolen afternoons, but she doesn’t question it.

But Zelda doesn’t respect this.

Zelda takes whenever and whatever she wants. And Hilda lets her.

Hilda lets a lot of things. 

And especially where Zelda is concerned. But also where Mary is concerned.

There are fathoms. There are cheating songs.

There is Hilda living her regular life. There is Hilda capitulating.

xxx

Hilda is allowing Zelda to eat her out just after noon on a Tuesday in the greenhouse when she tugs at a fistful of Zelda’s hair and says,

“Stop. It’s Mary’s day.”

Zelda looks up, face wet and glistening, but her eyes are mean.

“I don’t give even half a shit about what day is Mary’s,” Zelda says. She again buries her face in Hilda’s cunt, licks a few times at her clit before she penetrates her with a finger.

But Hilda is rigid against her in a way that is not orgasmic. Zelda retreats; eyes meet eyes.

“I know you want me,” Hilda says. “And I know you’re jealous. But you haven’t told me to stop. You haven’t told me you love me. You haven’t told me you want me to be exclusively yours because you can’t stand the idea of my being with anyone else. You haven’t claimed me.”

They consider each other, fathom each other.

“You want that?” Zelda says.

“Why else would I mention it?”

“But Mary. And the dreams—”

“Are Mary and dreams. Fake. Not a reality I can actually access.”

Zelda snaps her fingers to play Jolene. And she fucks Hilda senseless.

xxx

They’re naked on the concrete floor of the greenhouse, side by side, looking at each other.

“Tell her you’re done,” Zelda says. Hilda laughs, says,

“Because that line worked so well for you?”


	32. Chapter 32

It’s Friday.

Hilda should be looking forward to the weekend.

But she’s not.

She’s lying in bed staring at the ceiling contemplating her life choices:

She’s fucking Mary Wardwell, who may or may not be a higher demon. She’s fucking Zelda, who may or may not want her for purely narcissistic reasons. She’s sleeping with both of these people for egotistical, masochistic reasons of her own.

There’s a lot wrapped up in it.

And she’s supposed to tell Mary they’re through. Does she want them to be through? 

Has Mary merely served some sublimated, unconscious purpose to her, revealed only now that Zelda has illuminated it with her possessiveness? And, if that were true, what would it say about all of them?

She knows by now not to consult Freud or Jung on such matters.

Amelia Earhart died for her craft.

Hilda has died many times for much less.

Does she feel alive enough in either woman’s embrace to sacrifice anything of real value?

xxx

Hilda listens to Ma Rainey as she showers and collects herself.

Country-western fathoms evolved from blues fathoms, after all.

“See what you have done,” an ancient recording says. She remembers when the recording was recorded, doesn’t consider it ancient comparatively but acknowledges the passage of time anyway. A hundred years from now her problems will be either forgotten or laughable, vague memories, and she’ll probably still like the same music.

When she imagines that hundred years hence, she doesn’t see herself plagued with bizarre, sexy dreams. When she looks forward, she sees herself cooking breakfast for Zelda as always.

But she still isn’t sure. That future imagined Zelda is so neutral. And now that she’s seen passion and felt it, too, she’s not so keen on anything less.

xxx

It’s Friday afternoon.

Mary’s antsy in her own living room: She’s fiddling with a dreidel and bouncing a leg as she does so, even as she’s propped elegantly against her mantelpiece.

Hilda has just arrived, has just let herself in after a contrivedly lazy call from within to do so.

Hilda had avoided Zelda all day so she would be fresh enough to do what she needed to. But now here she is standing just inside Mary’s threshold, observing Mary so keyed up. Admittedly she doesn’t know a lot about Mary’s internal processes, but what is on offer seems so genuine and so excited. So she waits. 

She waits until Mary says,

“I’m contractually obligated to attend a certain number of extracurriculars. We have an hour before the basketball game I’ve committed to.”

Hilda hates waste, and so she feels compelled to approach. She fits herself into Mary’s body—muscle memory and pure attraction, but then she suddenly remembers herself:

“When might you have time to talk?”

Mary stiffens against her, and Hilda amends:

“I swear, love, it’s not about—” she pauses, realigns. “It’s much more mundane than you might think.”

Mary tightens her grip on Hilda’s body, says,

“Nothing about you is mundane.”

They finally kiss then.

Mary’s mouth is softer than she’d remembered or anticipated, and she melts into it. But still the fingers at Hilda’s sides are so hot, burning. She could swear she could feel each ridge of each unique fingerprint.

Mary pushes and pulls and caresses until she’s no longer draped against the fireplace but bracing Hilda against the wall just off the fireplace.

“Nothing about you is mundane, even the mundane thing you want to confront me with,” Mary says into Hilda’s ear as one hand travels down Hilda’s stiff cotton dress.

Hilda doesn’t know whether to sigh or pant, but her breath comes hard and fast regardless, and she says rather too fondly,

“I knew you’d understand.”

Mary’s eyes flash, and her grip tightens, but then suddenly she’s a yard away and saying,

“We both have obligations. You should go.”

Hilda is silent and still for a second, processing, and then she says,

“I should. But I often do things I shouldn’t.”

One of Mary’s eyebrows hitches. Hilda continues,

“Basketball season is so long.”

Hilda shouldn’t fathom a lot of the things she fathoms, but she does anyway, somehow. 

“I can catch a JV match next week,” Mary says.

xxx

As Hilda lies half-beneath a very warm, sleeping Mary, she laughs internally:

Is this what Mary had originally wanted when she’d invaded her dreams?


	33. Chapter 33

Mid-century nightmares are so passé, and yet here Hilda is, living one and more pressingly, currently ensconced in one. Real Hilda clicks her tongue derisively at the very idea of it, but Dream Hilda is Dream Hilda, stupid and scared and oblivious.

There are fathoms, sure. But what daring women are there asserting themselves? Amelia Earhart is missing presumed dead; Rosie the Riveter is safely back to being Rosie the Wife of a Male Riveter. Lucy remains as punchline.

xxx

It was the late ‘50s, and Hilda was vacuuming the office rug in her high-contrast technicolor magenta tulip skirt and coral sweetheart neck three-quarter sleeve sweater with gigantic lime vinyl belt and matching lime vinyl flats, hair back-combed to maximum volume and extra blonde besides. In black and white she would’ve been so ordinary.

She was vacuuming and focusing on the task of vacuuming, clunky Kirby maneuvering haphazardly.

But now there were hands on her breasts, a firm and insistent heat on her backside.

She turned off the vacuum, said,

“You’ll want dinner.”

“I’m famished. But not for dinner,” an indeterminate voice said.

Dream Hilda blinked, turned her head, tried to find someone, but found an indistinct mass of hyperreal colors instead. She turned back to the vacuum cleaner, said,

“I’ve got a pot roast on.” 

Hilda flipped the switch on the vacuum, and the sounds of it drowned out anything else.

xxx

Hilda doesn’t wake, but her unconscious mind transitions seamlessly.

xxx

It was the late ‘50s, and Hilda was vacuuming the office rug in her high-contrast technicolor magenta tulip skirt and coral sweetheart neck three-quarter sleeve sweater with gigantic lime vinyl belt and matching lime vinyl flats, hair back-combed to maximum volume and extra blonde besides. In black and white she would’ve been so ordinary.

“You do so much,” an indeterminate voice said. “I’d like to do something for you.”

Hilda flicked the switch on the vacuum, and all was silent for a moment. And then hands on her breasts, a firm and insistent heat on her backside.

xxx

Hilda jolts upright.

She doesn’t know which dream is which woman.

She isn’t sure there’s much of a difference.


	34. Chapter 34

Hilda avoids them both. She attends her clubs and committees. 

She lives her regular life. The regular life she used to have before all this sex nonsense. Her vacation hadn’t taken her far enough away. Perhaps the closeness of her daily routine might give her some kind of reprieve.

It works for a while.

It’s an off-brand adhesive bandage.

It doesn’t stick very well.

It’s an off-brand adhesive bandage on a recently amputated limb.

It doesn’t stick. And it doesn’t help at all.

xxx

Amelia Earhart had flown away, been lost, become a legend.

Who has flown away and gotten herself lost deliberately?

Thelma and Louise maybe.

But they’d gone off a cliff.

Lucy wants to be in the show.

Hilda doesn’t want there to be a show at all.

Hilda just wants and doesn’t want.

It’s the chocolate factory assembly line, rolling through faster than she can manage.

She fathoms a different fathom.

xxx

Hilda is lying in bed with Mary Wardwell.

They’re looking at each other.

This is easier than a Zelda encounter. There’s a lot wrapped up in it. But it’s a regular wrapped up. A regular fathom, whatever that might be.

xxx

“Would you like me to put on some music?” Mary says.

“Absolutely not,” Hilda says.

“You wouldn’t rather—”

“Fuck no,” Hilda says.

xxx

“You’ve chosen,” Zelda pants against Hilda’s neck.

“Choices are for fools and cowards.”


	35. Chapter 35

Hilda has arrived back from the PTO bake sale meeting just a few minutes too late. Or perhaps a few minutes too early. A shorter conversation with the physics teacher or a longer conversation with… uh… what’s her face’s attractive mother, and she could’ve avoided this encounter.

She pulls into the drive to see Mary standing on the front porch in a defensive but still unabashed and elegant pose holding a bouquet of yellow roses juxtaposed against the tense and menacing form of Zelda in the just barely opened front door. 

She contemplates turning right back around and talking to both of them about it separately later, but Zelda has spotted her already, and Mary’s posture has shifted in such a way that she knows she’s also clocked her.

She takes a deep breath and walks the green mile to them.

“Oh hello, Miss Wardwell,” Hilda says. Zelda glares at her. Wardwell smiles her fakest smile.

She has some erroneous notion she can pretend her way out of this, can smile prettily enough that they’ll all brush it aside and move on. 

But of course not.

“Good afternoon, Miss Spellman,” Wardwell says, saccharine and even weirder than usual. “I’ve come here to speak to you and offer you this floral arrangement as a token of friendship, to assure you that even though we’re fucking I don’t have unrealistic expectations of what you can provide for me or what I am to you because I know you have a lot going on in your own life, and even though we’re not a thing I do both respect and desire you. But your dear sister has just recently politely informed me where and with what force I can relocate these flowers and has also informed me that you are no longer available to me as any kind of partner, be it platonic or sexual. Thoughts?”

Mary cocks her head, smiles that mad smile, her weird eyes penetrating. And still Zelda is rigid and glaring.

“Well. Perhaps a cup of tea?” Hilda says.

xxx

It was a Church of Night orgy, Hilda sweating in a bustier.

“Do what you’re going to do,” Hilda said. Mary looked her up and down.

“You must mean whom I’m going to do.” Hilda looked herself up and down and then Mary down and then up.

“Same difference,” Hilda said.

Mary’s gaze moved from Hilda’s tits to a point over her right shoulder. Hilda turned to figure out what she was looking at that wasn’t her. 

Zelda was behind her, so close. Bra, panties, stilettos, clenched fists against her thighs, breathing through her red mouth.

“I like to watch. But I don’t like to just watch,” Zelda said.

xxx

She must have repressed the memory of it. Or perhaps dreams are so ethereal that they do whatever is relevant.

Dreams are fathoms. But dreams are fathoms before measurement systems had been standardized.

xxx

Zelda begrudgingly admits them.

And then Zelda sits so straight in her chair at the dining table.

Zelda has still not said one word.

Mary makes a show of brushing against Hilda as she asks,

“Where might I find a vase?” Hilda points to a far bottom cabinet.

And still they’re shoulder to shoulder as Hilda fills the kettle and Mary waits her turn at the sink.

Mary is sliding against her. But Mary is looking at Zelda.

The roses are on the table. The tea kettle whistles.

xxx

They all look at one another.

Fathom one another.

xxx

The tea has been poured. They’re all sitting at the table.

“For the record, I’m not sorry,” Mary says.

Hilda chokes on her sip of peppermint tea.

Zelda’s still glaring.

Mary looks at Zelda, says,

“I’m not sorry I recognized what you refused to for so long. I’m not sorry I got there first. And I’m not sorry to enjoy what was freely given to me.”

Zelda is increasingly red. She throws a butter knife toward Mary’s face. Any other time, any other person, any other witch, any other demon, she would’ve met her target. But Mary catches the knife between a finger and a thumb.

“I’m not sorry I’m better than you and that Hilda prefers me.”

Hilda finally speaks:

“I’m not sure either of those are true. But I know I’d prefer if you two quit it.” They both look at her. “Thank you for the flowers, Mary. They’re beautiful. I’ll be in the guest room tonight. But please. Don’t either of you come for me.”

xxx

Hilda sleeps immediately and without dreams.

She wakes and immediately fathoms.

Fuck Freud. Fuck everybody.

xxx

But she is fucking everybody.

And ain’t that a kick in the head.

xxx

She pours Zelda’s morning coffee around the already wilting flowers.

xxx

“She wants you to choose. I just want you.”

Hilda grinds down onto Mary’s face.

“I don’t want to talk about it, which is why I’m here, letting you—”

Mary’s tongue and fingers. Paroxysm.


	36. Chapter 36

Hilda’s never stayed the night before.

And she ought not have this time, either.

She wakes to a pounding in her chest and skull. The same anxious pounding.

But there’s music seeping in, and she rises.

Mary is nude in the kitchen. And so is Hilda.

Hilda doesn’t know Mary’s morning routine and so doesn’t know what to expect.

There’s country-western music and turkey sausage patties frying.

“I didn’t know if it was the cheating you liked or just the melody,” Mary says.

“If you don’t know by now—” Hilda starts, reciting nonsensical lines she’s accidentally memorized. Their eyes meet, and Mary’s are so weird.

Mary takes her against the kitchen sink, sloppy, mouths everywhere, fingers everywhere. It’s probably because they’re nude. Hilda’s made so many bad decisions nude. But also so many good decisions. 

Decisions. Neutral. Sexy regardless.

The sausage is burning.

“The sausage is burning,” Hilda pants as Mary explores her naked body as if it’s a new naked body.

“You say that as if I care,” Mary says around Hilda’s left nipple.

Hilda reaches, turns off the burner. Even as she says,

“You don’t care about that. But you care about something.”

Mary bites her left inner thigh, and they both moan.

xxx

Hilda watches as Mary smoothes her skirt.

Mary is going to teach high school English and social studies, administrate.

She’s in charge there at Greendale High.

“I’d very much like to see you again tonight,” Mary says.

“I’ll check my calendar,” Hilda says.

Mary nods.

Hilda knows she knows it’s a no.

xxx

Hilda works a shift at the diner.

She drives around town until she’s been stopped at least twice at every stoplight that turns into a flashing red past 10.

She’s got the windows down and the radio at max volume. She’s heard the same TED Talk on two different stations.

Maybe it’s safe to sneak home now.

xxx

It is and isn’t safe.

It’s not as dark as she’d like, but at least it’s silent.

It’s a fathom she doesn’t fathom until she has to.

She crosses the kitchen, the hall, the bottom step.

But then a voice from the parlor.

xxx

Hilda sits primly on the settee.

“Is there—are you ok?” Sabrina says from the desk, her face illuminated by the harsh glow of her laptop screen.

“Hunky dory, lamb. But. We should both be in bed.”

Sabrina looks at her. They look at each other.

Sabrina says,

“Is Auntie Z ok?”

“No,” Hilda says. “But when have you ever known her to be ok?”

Sabrina contemplates. Hilda contemplates her contemplation.

“Maybe we should have a family dinner,” Sabrina says.

“Maybe we should,” Hilda says.

xxx

Dreamless sleep. Quilting group.

A new recipe comes to her upon waking.

Enough like a dream.

xxx

The first course is a vegetable soup with a tomato base. It’s hardly ever hot enough in Greendale to grow a decent tomato, but Hilda has a greenhouse and her ways besides.

They all slurp and look at each other.

A second course. A third course. A main course.

Zelda cuts into the tofu pretending to be a ribeye, says,

“Hilda. What was the best part of your day?”

Zelda’s eyes bore into her.

Hilda knows that Zelda is trying something new.

“Well. I thought all my honeysuckle was dead. But it’s growing again.”

Zelda smiles a forced smile, takes a bite of the fake ribeye and tamps down her grimace, turns to Ambrose, says,

“And what was the best part of your day?”

Ambrose swallows clunkily, says,

“Goliath figured out the maze I set up for him.”

Zelda nods. Turns again. Says,

“Sabrina?”

“It’s Friday,” Sabrina says. Sabrina’s eyes flash and then she counters, “What was the best part of your day, auntie?”

Zelda stares at Hilda.

“It’s Friday. And we’re all here together,” Zelda says.

xxx

Hilda’s in her own bed, staring at the ceiling in the dark.

Zelda whispers,

“May I join you?”

“Yes,” Hilda whispers.

They’re both staring at the ceiling in the dark in Hilda’s bed.

There’s a fathom there. But it’s not between them. It’s around them. Oppressive.

Zelda’s fingertips brush Hilda’s thigh.

“I don’t know what you want from me. I don’t know what I want from you. I just know we both want,” Zelda says.

“Everyone wants,” Hilda says.

“I don’t care about everyone. I care about you and me.”

Hilda hears the words, chews the words, digests the words. 

Finally, Hilda says,

“Now you do, anyhow.”

Zelda huffs.

Hilda huffs.

They huff together and separately.


	37. Chapter 37

“You haven’t been around as much. Because she’s being nice to you,” Mary Wardwell says around three fingers of whiskey in her armchair at the lapping fire.

Hilda stares into her own two fingers of whiskey, adjusts herself in the armchair a little removed from the lapping fire.

They haven’t gotten right to it as usual. Or right not to it as usual. 

They’re thinking and drinking tonight, unusual.

Hilda says,

“I haven’t been around as much. And she’s being nicer to me. Not sure there’s a causation so much as a correlation.”

Mary laughs one laugh, takes one long drink.

“Anyway,” Mary says, “I have something to say.”

“Oh?” Hilda says. Mary gulps the rest of her tumbler. 

And then Mary stands, places herself deliberately at the mantelpiece, poses. Hilda looks at her. Mary’s beautiful and arranging herself to appear at her most beautiful. Hilda is suspicious of the effort. They’ve been fucking too long for stilted nonsense. But still Mary is so enticing and exciting.

“I want you as much as I always have,” Mary says.

Their eyes meet, and there is both lust and diffidence there.

Mary blinks against Hilda’s reticence, continues,

“I want you so much. As much or more than anyone has ever wanted you. And haven’t I proved that? Haven’t I shown you? But I can’t. I can’t have you. There’s too much there.”

“You mean—“ Hilda says.

“I mean so much more.”

They look at each other. There’s a fathom Hilda is unable to fathom.

“We can’t. Anymore. Because. Well. You’ll know soon enough.” They look at each other again. Hilda doesn’t know what to make of the honesty, the weirdness.

“Ok?” Hilda says.

“Catch me in a dream sometime, babe,” Mary says.

Mary’s on her knees in front of Hilda.

“I thought we’d agreed—” Hilda says.

“We had,” Mary says. Her hands inch up under Hilda’s skirt. “But ‘to every thing there is a season.’”

“I know only the most popular verses.” Hilda gasps as fingers whisper against her knees.

“It’s not canon scripture anyway,” Mary says, pushing at fabric, lips following hands.

xxx

Hilda completes many routines. She does and is.

And Zelda is so nice to her.

Zelda is Ethel Mertz, partner in crime. A lavender marriage.

xxx

Mary is not Mary. Mary is Lilith.

The world shifts.

But not as much as it might.

It makes too much strange sense in the night.

xxx

It was 1943.

There were bodies and air raids.

Hilda was driving an ambulance.

And Mary appeared there in her passenger seat.

Mary clutched at her non-regulation hair and then said,

“I want you, but I’m not what you want.”

Zelda was somewhere making bombs in a well-regulated factory.

xxx

Hilda gasps awake.

She knows and doesn’t know.

Hilda fathoms and fathoms again.

Freud, Maslow. Who’s the latest psychologist?

xxx

Linda Ronstadt.

Is the only psychologist she trusts.

xxx

Mary has broken up with her. They hadn’t been a thing. But their not thing has been ended regardless. And Mary is not Mary but Lilith.

A fathom she hadn’t foreseen but had somehow known.

Zelda has not broken up with her.

Zelda is even nicer.

Hilda is suspicious.

xxx

Hilda tests it.

She’d once died for Tammy Wynette.

Now she’s afforded a fond smile.

And then, a few hours later, in the dark of their room Zelda says,

“‘I don’t want to play house.’”

Zelda has a good voice, near-perfect pitch. But still she has chosen to recite this country-western lyric out of tune and only marginally in time.

“But what do you want to play?” Hilda says.

“I don’t want to play at all,” Zelda says.

Hilda believes her.

Hilda believes very little anymore, but she believes this.

Hilda believes Zelda, and Hilda believes Lilith, who had inhabited Mary.

Hilda believes Lilith will catch her in a dream sometime.

xxx

Hilda trusts her subconscious to tell her things.

It’s the way of witches.


End file.
